Today in 1948, Connecticut’s first television station WNHC-TV, Channel 6 (now WTNH Channel 8) began broadcasting in New Haven. The introduction of this new media to Connecticut was the brainchild of Aldo DeDomenicis, an Italian pasta-wholesaler who had previously found success buying radio time on Italian programs and selling that time as radio ads…
Author: waltwould
I am State Historian of Connecticut Emeritus and an Associate Professor of HistoryEmeritus at the University of Connecticut. Check my links to 1) See What Happened Today in Connecticut History; 2) Listen to our latest Connecticut History podcast; 3) Attend my next lecture, performance, or book signing. See you soon, I hope.
June 13: An Old New England Tradition Goes International
Today in 1914, the people of Manchester turned a time-honored New England tradition on its head. Rather than celebrating Old Home Days – an annual event held in communities across New England to bring emigrated Yankees back for a visit to their “Old Home” town – the city celebrated “Homeland Day,” where Manchester’s foreign-born…
June 11: UCONN’s 1st Black Basketball Player
Harrison “Honey” Fitch, arrived on the University of Connecticut (then Connecticut State College) in the fall of 1932 and he made a solid impression, fast. Fitch, the first Black basketball player for the University of Connecticut (then Connecticut State College) and at the time the only Black student, had already earned the nickname “Honey” for…
June 7: An Early Black Photographer’s Vision of Equality Changes Focus
When Augustus Washington arrived in Hartford soon after leaving Dartmouth College in the autumn of 1844, his path in life seemed clear. The son of a former slave and a mother of Asian descent, he had at an early age developed a hunger for knowledge and a deep commitment to the abolition of slavery….
April 26: Sarah Boone Gets a Patent For a Better Way to Iron
Today in 1892, African American inventor Sarah Boone of New Haven patented an ironing board, which was the precursor to the modern appliance residing in many of our homes today. When Sarah Boon was living in New Haven, the fashion of the time was for women to wear corsets. Since the late-1800s, New Haven…
April 16: Frederick Douglass & Social Media in Hartford, 1864
Carte-de-visite photographs were the hot social media of the mid-nineteenth century. These small portrait photographs, mounted on cards, were some of the first such images to be commercially reproduced, and they created a craze for collectible photographs. People collected carte-de-visite portraits of family, friends and celebrities and then mounted them in photograph albums….
April 15: The Middletown Man Who Built the First Transcontinental Railroad – But in Another Country.
Back when they taught such things in the classroom, many Connecticans learned this palindrome (a phrase that says the exact same thing read backwards or forwards) in geography class: ” A Man, A Plan, A Canal: Panama.” What we were not taught, though, is that men made plans to make transportation across Panama a…
April 4: Saving the Elm City’s Elm Trees – The First Time
Today in 1909, the last in a series of “campaign documents” aimed at mobilizing citizens to save the trees that had given New Haven its reputation as one of the world’s most beautiful cities was published in the New Haven Sunday Union. Decades before the 1936 arrival of the devastating Dutch elm disease, the “City…
April 1: A Political Cartoonist for the 20th-Century Woman
As the first political cartoonist ever to win a Pulitzer Prize, Clarence Daniel “C. D.” Batchelor thought having been born on April Fool’s Day (in 1888) was appropriate to his calling. The cane-collecting (he died owning more than 500), dapper, Kansas-born, self-styled “character” – “It was just as easy to be a character as…
February 24: Hartford’s First African American Policeman & the First of the Famed Tuskegee Airmen.
The Tuskegee Airmen are celebrated today both as war heroes and as the first Black aviators in American military service. With American involvement in World War II looming, 13 men entered training at Tuskegee air field in Alabama, and five survived the rigorous training program to earn their silver wings on March 7, 1942….
February 7: Amelia Earhart Lands at the Altar, but Not without a Pre-Nup.
It may or may not not have been a marriage made in heaven, but aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart’s wedding to publishing magnate George P. Putnam was not entered into through flighty considerations. Putnam succeeded in landing the famed aviator as a bride only after his sixth proposal, and when they did tie the knot…
February 1: The Man Who Made the First Map of the United States.
Abel Buell was a man able to do just about anything, just not very well. At various times a convicted counterfeiter, goldsmith, engraver, armsmaker, inventor, textile manufacturer, packet boat proprietor, auctioneer, privateer, mint master, mapmaker, and husband to four wives, Buel spent most of his 81 years pursuing a seemingly limitless array of schemes…