John Fitzgerald Kennedy (May 29, 1917 – November 22, 1963)

One of America’s best-loved presidents, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 
was born into a politically and socially prominent family in Brookline, Massachusetts, on May 29, 1917.

The wreckage of Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 spy plane
(top/bottom) on May 1, 1960.

An American U-2 spy plane piloted by Francis Gary Powers was
shot down while conducting espionage over the Soviet Union.

The incident derailed an important summit meeting between
President Dwight D. Eisenhower and Soviet leader Nikita
Khrushchev that was scheduled for later that month.   
     

After being shot down, Powers (right) appeared in the dock
of the Supreme Court of the U.S.S.R. and was tried by the
Soviet Military Board on August 19, 1960.

Francis Gary Powers holds a model of a U-2 spy plane as he testifies before the U.S.  Senate Armed Services Committee
after his release from Soviet prison in march 1962.

Francis Gary Powers (August 17, 1929 – August 1, 1977)

Powers was piloting a helicopter for Los Angeles TV station
KNBC Channel 4 over the San Fernando Valley on August 1,
1977, when the aircraft crashed, killing him and his cameraman
George Spears.

TIM MAGUIRE

The Saturn V SA-508 rocket carrying the Apollo 13
mission really did blast off at 14:13 (military time
for 2:13 p.m., ET) from the Kennedy Space Center
in Florida—and in Houston (CT),

 
Little White Schoolhouse, birthplace of the Republican Party
on March 20, 1854 in Ripon, WI. The structure was built in its original location in 1853 as a school building for the young
town of Ripon.   
   

In Ripon, Wisconsin, former members of the Whig Party met to
establish a new party to oppose the spread of slavery into the
western territories. The Whig Party, which was formed in 1834
to oppose the “tyranny” of President Andrew Jackson, had
shown itself incapable of coping with the national crisis over
slavery.

With the successful introduction of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill
of 1854,  that dissolved the terms of the Missouri Compromise
and allowed slave or free status to be decided in the territories
by popular sovereignty, the Whigs disintegrated. By February
1854, anti-slavery Whigs had begun meeting in the upper
midwestern states to discuss the formation of a new party, one 
such meeting, in Wisconsin on March 20, 1854, is generally
remembered as the founding meeting of the Republican Party
(above).

On this day in 1751, James Madison, drafter of the Constitution,
recorder of the Constitutional Convention, author of the Federalist 
Papers and fourth president of the United States, was born on a
plantation in Virginia.

Madison first distinguished himself as a student at the College
of New Jersey (now Princeton University), where he successfully completed a four-year course of study in two years and, in 1769,
helped found the American Whig Society, the second literary and
debate society at Princeton (and the world), to rival the previously established Cliosophic Society.