The idea for the Empire State Building is said to have been born of a competition between Walter Chrysler of the Chrysler Corporation and John Jakob Raskob of General Motors, to see who could erect the taller building. Chrysler had already begun work on the famous Chrysler Building, the gleaming 1,046-foot skyscraper in midtown Manhattan. Not to be bested, Raskob assembled a group of well-known investors, including former New York Governor Alfred E. Smith. The group chose the architecture firm Shreve, Lamb and Harmon Associates to design the building. The Art-Deco plans, said to have been based in large part on the look of a pencil, were also builder-friendly: The entire building went up in just over a year, under budget (at $40 million) and well ahead of schedule. During certain periods of building, the frame grew an astonishing four-and-a-half stories a week.

At the time of its completion, the Empire State Building, at 102 stories and 1,250 feet high (1,454 feet to the top of the lightning rod), was the world’s tallest skyscraper. The Depression-era construction employed as many as 3,400 workers on any single day, most of whom received an excellent pay rate, especially given the economic conditions of the time. The new building imbued New York City with a deep sense of pride, desperately needed in the depths of the Great Depression, when many city residents were unemployed and prospects looked bleak. The grip of the Depression on New York’s economy was still evident a year later, however, when only 25 percent of the Empire State’s offices had been rented.

In 1972, the Empire State Building lost its title as world’s tallest building to New York’s World Trade Center, which itself was the tallest skyscraper for but a year. Today the honor belongs to Dubai’s Burj Khalifa tower, which soars 2,716 feet into the sky.

The post Empire State Building dedicated appeared first on HISTORY.

By 1786, Mozart—just 30 years old—was already one of Europe's most accomplished composers, with dozens of now-canonical symphonies, concertos, sonatas, chamber works and sacred pieces to his name. He had also written more than a dozen operas, though not yet the works for which he is best known today. In the last five years of his life, before his death in 1791, Mozart produced a remarkable run of operas that remain central to the repertory. That period of sustained creative success began with "Figaro."

The opera marked Mozart's first collaboration with librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte. For their source, they turned to a controversial play by the French writer Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, "The Marriage of Figaro." First performed in 1784, it was the second part of a trilogy that began with "The Barber of Seville" (later the basis for the Rossini opera). Authorities in France had initially restricted the play because of its "subversive” elements. The plot centers on a Spanish nobleman, Count Almaviva, who tries to seduce Susanna, a young servant in his household. The scheme is ultimately foiled—and he is humiliated—by his wife Countess Rosina, working together with his servant Figaro, who is also Susanna’s fiancé.

Because some contemporaries saw the story as subverting class hierarchies and even encouraging revolution, the play had been banned by Austrian censors. But Mozart and Da Ponte softened its political edge, presenting it as a fast-paced comedy. This helped win approval from their patron, the Habsburg Emperor Joseph II, who allowed the opera to be staged in Vienna. (A fictionalized version of this approval appears in the 1984 film Amadeus.)

Mozart’s music and Da Ponte’s libretto proved a powerful combination. At its Vienna premiere, "Figaro" prompted five encores—five that night, followed by seven the following night. And it led to two more celebrated collaborations between the two artists: "Don Giovanni" and "Così fan tutte."

The post Mozart’s opera “The Marriage of Figaro” premieres in Vienna appeared first on HISTORY.

Steinem, a freelance writer, was commissioned by SHOW to apply for a job at the Playboy Club under a fake name and document her experience. Ads for jobs as a server at the club, whose female employees were all known as Bunnies, portrayed the work as something akin to paid participation in a party straight out of Playboy Magazine. As Steinem quickly learned, the truth was far uglier. Bunnies were paid less than advertised and subject to a system of demerits, which could be given for offenses such as refusing to go out with a customer in a rude way (even though Bunnies were strictly forbidden to go out with most customers) or allowing the cotton tail on the back of their uniforms to get dirty.

Steinem's account was replete with examples of the toll the work took on Bunnies: uniforms so tight one could barely move, swollen and blistering feet from hours of working in high heels, and near-constant harassment by the drunk businessmen who made up most of the clientele. After one night when roughly 2,000 people came through the club's doors, Steinem estimated there had been maybe ten who "looked at us not as objects ... but as if we might be human beings."

"A Bunny's Tale" was one of the first feminist attacks on Playboy and the “sexually liberated” but male-centric lifestyle it embodied. Hefner tried to take it in stride, stating that Playboy was on the side of the women's liberation movement and asserting that applications to work at the Playboy Club had increased thanks to Steinem's article. He also ordered the club to stop giving new Bunnies mandatory blood tests and gynecological exams, practices Steinem had questioned in her article.

Though it helped an early-career Steinem establish her credentials as a reporter and a feminist, she regretted the piece for years after it ran, dismayed by a slew of offers to take on sexualized undercover roles and haunted by photos of herself in the Bunny costume, which had been taken during her brief time as an employee. Over time, however, she has said that she is glad she wrote the piece, an exposé that laid bare the struggle of women who were more or less objectified for a living.

The post Gloria Steinem publishes first half of her undercover Playboy exposé “A Bunny’s Tale” appeared first on HISTORY.

The Spanish-American War had its origins in the rebellion against Spanish rule that began in Cuba in 1895. The repressive measures that Spain took to suppress the guerrilla war, such as herding Cuba’s rural population into disease-ridden garrison towns, were graphically portrayed in U.S. newspapers and enflamed public opinion. In January 1898, violence in Havana led U.S. authorities to order the battleship USS Maine to the city’s port to protect American citizens. On February 15, a massive explosion of unknown origin sank the Maine in the Havana harbor, killing 260 of the 400 American crewmembers aboard. An official U.S. Naval Court of Inquiry ruled in March, without much evidence, that the ship was blown up by a mine but did not directly place the blame on Spain. Much of Congress and a majority of the American public expressed little doubt that Spain was responsible, however, and called for a declaration of war.

In April, the U.S. Congress prepared for war, adopting joint congressional resolutions demanding a Spanish withdrawal from Cuba and authorizing President William McKinley to use force. On April 23, President McKinley asked for 125,000 volunteers to fight against Spain. The next day, Spain issued a declaration of war. The United States declared war on April 25. U.S. Commodore George Dewey, in command of the seven-warship U.S. Asiatic Squadron anchored north of Hong Kong, was ordered to “capture or destroy” the Spanish Pacific fleet, which was known to be in the coastal waters of the Spanish-controlled Philippines.

On April 30, Dewey’s lookouts caught sight of Luzon, the main Philippine island. That night, under cover of darkness and with the lights aboard the U.S. warships extinguished, the squadron slipped by the defensive guns of Corregidor Island and into Manila Bay. After dawn rose, the Americans located the Spanish fleet: 10 out-of-date warships anchored off the Cavite naval station. The U.S. fleet, in comparison, was well armed and well staffed, largely due to the efforts of the energetic assistant secretary of the navy, Theodore Roosevelt, who had also selected Dewey for the command of the Asiatic Squadron.

At 5:41 a.m., at a range of 5,400 yards from the enemy, Commodore Dewey turned to the captain of his flagship, the Olympia, and said, “You may fire when ready, Gridley.” Two hours later, the Spanish fleet was decimated, and Dewey ordered a pause in the fighting. He met with his captains and ordered the crews a second breakfast. The four surviving Spanish vessels, trapped in the little harbor at Cavite, refused to surrender, and at 11:15 a.m. fighting resumed. At 12:30 p.m., a signal was sent from the gunboat USS Petrel to Dewey’s flagship: “The enemy has surrendered.”

Dewey’s decisive victory cleared the way for the U.S. occupation of Manila in August and the eventual transfer of the Philippines from Spanish to American control. In Cuba, Spanish forces likewise crumbled in the face of superior U.S. forces, and on August 12 an armistice was signed between Spain and the United States. In December, the Treaty of Paris officially ended the brief Spanish-American War. The once-proud Spanish empire was virtually dissolved, and the United States gained its first overseas empire. Puerto Rico and Guam were ceded to the United States, the Philippines were bought for $20 million, and Cuba became a U.S. protectorate. Philippine insurgents who fought against Spanish rule during the war immediately turned their guns against the new occupiers, and 10 times more U.S. troops died suppressing the Philippines than in defeating Spain.

The post The U.S. destroys Spanish Pacific fleet in Battle of Manila Bay appeared first on HISTORY.

It had originally been intended to open at Manhattan's Radio City Music Hall. But months before its release, Orson Welles’ landmark film began generating such controversy that the venue eventually refused to show it.

By the time he began working on Citizen Kane, the 24-year-old Welles had already made a name for himself as Hollywood’s enfant terrible. He first found success on Broadway and on the radio; his October 1938 broadcast version of the science-fiction classic The War of the Worlds was so realistic that some listeners actually believed Martians had invaded New Jersey. Having signed a lucrative contract with RKO studios, Welles was struggling to find a subject for his first feature film when his friend, the writer Herman Mankiewicz, suggested that he base it on the life of the publishing baron William Randolph Hearst. Hearst presided over the country’s leading newspaper empire, ruling it from San Simeon, a sprawling estate perched atop a hill along California’s central coastline.

A preview of Citizen Kane in early February 1941 had drawn almost universally favorable reviews from critics. However, one viewer, the leading Hollywood gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, was incensed by the film and Welles’ portrayal of its protagonist, Charles Foster Kane. She took her concerns to Hearst himself, who soon began waging a full-scale campaign against Welles and his film, barring the Hearst newspapers from running ads for it and enlisting the support of Hollywood bigwigs such as Louis B. Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It was said Hearst was particularly angry over the movie’s depiction of a character based on his companion, Marion Davies, a former showgirl whom he had helped become a popular Hollywood actress. For his part, Welles threatened to sue Hearst for trying to suppress the film and also to sue RKO if the company did not release the film.

When Citizen Kane finally opened in May 1941, it was a failure at the box office. Although reviews were favorable, and it was nominated for nine Academy Awards, Welles was booed at that year’s Oscar ceremony, and RKO quietly archived the film. It was only years later, when it was re-released, that Citizen Kane began to garner well-deserved accolades for its pioneering camera and sound work, as well as its complex blend of drama, black comedy, history, biography and even fake-newsreel or “mockumentary” footage that has informed hundreds of films produced since then. It consistently ranks at the top of film critics’ lists, most notably grabbing the No. 1 spot on the American Film Institute’s poll of America’s 100 Greatest Films.

After Citizen Kane, Welles’ diverse works consisted of everything from Shakespearean adaptations to documentaries. Some of his most acclaimed films included The Stranger (1946), The Lady from Shanghai (1948) and Chimes at Midnight (1966). In his later years, he narrated documentaries and appeared in commercials, and he left behind several unfinished films when he died at the age of 70 on October 10, 1985.

The post “Citizen Kane” released appeared first on HISTORY.

The congress, also referred to as the Women’s Peace Conference, was the result of an invitation by a Dutch women’s suffrage organization to women’s rights activists around the world to gather in peaceful assemblage during one of the most divisive and intense international conflicts in history: World War I. It included more than 1,200 delegates from 12 countries—including Britain, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy, Poland, Belgium and the United States.

Starting with two basic assertions—that international disputes should be handled by pacific means and that women should have the right to exercise their own vote in government—the International Congress of Women called for a process of continuous mediation to be implemented, without armistice, until peace could be restored among the warring nations. By continuous mediation, the delegates meant that a conference of neutral nations should be convened that would invite suggestions for settlement from each of the belligerent nations and submit to all of them simultaneously, reasonable proposals as a basis of peace.

Their resolutions, announced at the close of the congress on May 1, endorsed measures designed for international cooperation, including an international court and a so-called Society of Nations, general disarmament and national self-determination. The delegates included a specific call for women to be given the vote: Since the combined influence of the women of all countries is one of the strongest forces for the prevention of war, and since women can only have full responsibility and effective influence when they have equal political rights with men, this International Congress of Women demands their political enfranchisement.

The congress founded the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), an organization that still exists today. The first president of the WILPF was Jane Addams, the leader of the American delegation to the congress and the co-founder of the Chicago social service organization Hull House. Addams and other delegates met with U.S. President Woodrow Wilson during the summer of 1915, knowing that the success of their plan depended to a great extent on the president’s agreement to initiate and lead mediation between the hostile nations of Europe. Though Wilson was sympathetic to the proposals of the congress, he eventually moved away from the principles of mediation and towards military preparedness (and eventual U.S. entrance into the war in April 1917).

Printed in English, French and German, the resolutions of the International Congress of Women were distributed to European heads of state in early May 1915. The congress also determined that a delegation of women would be sent to meet with representatives of the belligerent governments to plead the cause of continuous mediation. To that end, 30 delegates toured Europe between May and June 1915; though its arguments did little to sway the leaders of the warring nations, the proposals introduced by the congress are still used today as guidelines for many diplomatic negotiations between hostile nations.

The post International Congress of Women adopts resolutions on peace, women’s suffrage appeared first on HISTORY.

The myths and fabrications concerning the life of Calamity Jane are so numerous it is difficult to discover her true story. Legend has it that at various times Jane worked as a dishwasher at Fort Bridger, a laborer on the Union Pacific, a scout for General Custer, and a teamster. Some claim that Jane’s parents died when she was only eight years old and the event led to her nickname “Calamity,” but serious historians have never found any solid evidence for any of these legends.

What reliable records do exist indicate that she was born Martha Jane Canary and spent the first 13 years of her life in rural Missouri. In 1865, she and her family moved west to the booming gold rush town of Virginia City, Montana. There she grew into a tall and powerfully built young woman who liked to wear men’s clothing and spend her time in the company of men. Like many young frontier women, Jane learned to ride and shoot at an early age, and she apparently bridled at the narrow limits placed on women in her era.

By the early 1870s, Jane appears to have been out on her own. She was able to find occasional work in Virginia City as a laundress, one of the few occupations that were open to women at the time. In 1875, she joined a scientific expedition into the Black Hills of South Dakota, probably working as a laundress and camp follower rather than the teamster of legend. Still, Jane’s participation in the expedition put her in the Black Hills during the height of the subsequent gold rush to the region from 1876 to 1880. She eventually settled in the rugged boomtown of Deadwood, South Dakota.

Given to hard drinking and carousing, she attracted public attention with stunts like riding a bull down the main street of Rapid City. By the 1890s, many Americans were already fascinated with the rapidly fading days of the Wild West, and a wild woman like Jane was extremely interesting. Jane catered to this fascination with boasts of her supposed exploits, claiming to have been a uniformed army scout for General Custer, for example, though there was no evidence this was true. Ultimately, Jane was a performer, providing the public with the appropriately grand and mythic image of the West.

By 1896, Jane’s hard living had begun to take a toll, and she was suffering from the debilitating effects of severe alcoholism. Nonetheless, she accepted an offer to appear on the stage in Minneapolis in her self-created persona of Calamity Jane. In 1901, she was even invited to the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Wherever she went, Jane brought along copies of her hopelessly inaccurate autobiography, which she sold to credulous fans for a few pennies.

One of the most persistent legends has been that Jane was married to the famous gunslinger and lawman Wild Bill Hickok and that she may have given birth to his child. Yet again, biographers have been unable to establish any connection between Jane and Hickok. There is some evidence Jane may have given birth to a daughter, but if the child existed at all, its paternity was uncertain. Most likely, Jane simply fabricated the affair with Hickok, although she eventually may have come to believe that this-and other stories about her life–were actually true.

Two years before she died, she seems to have finally tired of living the self-created persona of Calamity Jane. Found sick and drunk in an African-American bordello in Horr, Montana, she grumbled an uncharacteristic wish that the world would “leave me alone and let me go to hell my own route.” She died at the age of 51 on August 1, 1903, in Terry, South Dakota.

The post Adventurer and performer Calamity Jane is born appeared first on HISTORY.

Williams enjoyed a successful NBA career with the Philadelphia 76ers and New Jersey Nets from 1990 to 1999, when a leg injury forced his retirement. Though he had several brushes with the law, Williams was better known for his affable demeanor and off-the-court charity and youth work, and was widely praised for taking in his nephews after two of his sisters died of AIDS.

That all changed on February 14, 2001, when police were called to Williams’ 65-acre estate in Alexandria Township, New Jersey, after the shooting of Christofi. A 911 tape reveals that the caller alluded that a man at the estate had shot himself, and that is what witnesses told police when they first arrived at the scene. Soon, though, the story changed, and witnesses began to reveal that it was actually Williams who had been holding the gun.

According to reports, Christofi had been hired to drive a group of Williams’ friends, including several members of the Harlem Globetrotters, to a local restaurant, while another group drove with Williams. Once at the restaurant, the men racked up a significant liquor bill. Christofi then drove some of the group back to Williams’ estate, where he was invited inside.

As the evening continued, Williams invited his guests to check out his gun collection in his mansion’s master bedroom.Prosecutors allege that soon after, he took out a Browning 12-gauge shotgun, and, with it pointed toward Christofi, yanked it upward. The gun discharged, sending the fatal buckshot into the driver’s stomach. Some witnesses say Williams almost immediately began tampering with the scene to make it appear that Christofi killed himself while the rest of the group had been elsewhere in the house. Williams allegedly jumped into a swimming pool to clean himself, changed clothes, wiped down the shotgun and repositioned it. They also say Williams pressured them to lie to police.

Williams was indicted for aggravated manslaughter and witness and evidence tampering, among other charges. On April 30, 2004, after a three-month trial, he was acquitted of the most serious charge, aggravated manslaughter, but convicted of four cover-up charges. The jury was unable to reach a verdict on reckless manslaughter, the second most serious charge. Jurors said afterward that they just did not believe Williams intended to kill Christofi.

On May 21, prosecutors took the first steps toward retrying Williams. After several years of delays, in February 2010 he pled guilty to aggravated assault and was sentenced to five years in prison. He was released from prison in April 2012.

The post Former NBA All-Star Jayson Williams indicted for manslaughter appeared first on HISTORY.

Blair studied law at Oxford and joined the Labour Party in 1975. In 1983, he was elected to Parliament from Sedgefield and became the party’s spokesperson on treasury affairs in 1985, and trade and industry in 1987. In the next year, he joined the shadow cabinet as energy secretary and in 1993 became shadow home secretary. In 1994, he was elected leader of the Labour Party, and during the next three years he orchestrated Labour’s ideological shift to the middle, borrowing such popular Conservative policies as free-market reforms. In May 1997, his “new” Labour Party won a resounding victory, and he was sworn in as prime minister. With Blair at its helm, the Labour Party went on to win three consecutive general-election victories. Blair was re-elected in 2001 and 2005, despite his support for U.S. President George W. Bush and the war in Iraq, which was unpopular among many Brits. He served longer as prime minister than any other Labour Party member in history.

The post Labour Party returns to power in Britain appeared first on HISTORY.

Conceived by Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, the Great Exposition was a rousing success, hosting 6 million visitors before it closed in October. The many goods displayed ranged from kitchen appliances to false teeth, silks to farm machinery.

The post First-ever “Great Exhibition” opens in London appeared first on HISTORY.

The Babe's victory in South Carolina was the final time she set foot on a golf course for an LPGA event. Despite her worsening sickness, she summoned a legendary effort that weekend and would later write in her biography, “I still wasn’t ready to admit that I wasn’t in the condition to play. I was more determined than ever to win one.”

Over the course of her amateur and professional golf career, Didrikson Zaharias won 82 tournaments, including 10 majors. Her final major win, at the U.S. Women’s Open, came after her cancer diagnosis. She won that tournament by 12 strokes while wearing a colostomy bag.

Golf probably wasn't even Didrikson’s best sport. She dominated track and field at the 1932 Olympics Games, finishing with gold medals in the 80-meter hurdles and javelin throw. She earned a silver in the high jump.

On September 27, 1956, less than two years after her final golf tournament victory, Didrikson Zaharias died. She was 45.

The post Babe Didrikson Zaharias wins final LPGA tournament of her career appeared first on HISTORY.

The couple met in 1959 while Elvis, 24, was stationed in Germany, where Priscilla’s father was stationed as a U.S. Air Force officer. Their seven-year courtship—she was only 14 when they met—culminated when he gave her a three-karat diamond engagement ring.

At the wedding, Elvis sported a black tuxedo while his bride wore a ’60s-style, loose white organza gown with long lace sleeves and pearl embellishments—bought off the rack by Priscilla who tried to escape attention by disguising herself in a blonde wig and using the code name “Mrs. Hodge.” A three-foot tulle veil and rhinestone tiara perched atop her iconic black bouffant hairdo. The lavish wedding reception, which about 100 people attended, included a five-foot-tall, six-tier wedding cake that reportedly cost $3,200. The bride and groom danced their first dance to—what else?—Elvis’ hit ballad “Love Me Tender.” They then flew to Palm Springs, where they stayed in a home dubbed the Elvis Honeymoon Hideaway.

The Presleys, adored as they were as a couple, divorced in 1973. But Priscilla Presley, who became a businesswoman and actress, told the Daily Mail in 2012 she had no regrets.

“Elvis was absolutely the love of my life, and there’s no sadness about it because I have my memories, and they’re delicious and they’re all mine,” she said.

The post Elvis Presley marries Priscilla Beaulieu appeared first on HISTORY.

The idea of a Law Day had first been proposed by the American Bar Association in 1957. The desire to suppress the celebration of May 1, or May Day, as International Workers’ Day aided in Law Day’s creation. May Day had communist overtones in the minds of many Americans, because of its celebration of working people as a governing class in the Soviet Union and elsewhere.

The American Bar Association defines Law Day as: “A national day set aside to celebrate the rule of law. Law Day underscores how law and the legal process have contributed to the freedoms that all Americans share.” The language of the statute ordaining May 1 calls it “a special day of celebration by the American people in appreciation of their liberties and rededication to the ideals of equality and justice under law.”

On a day that, in many parts of the world, inspires devotion to the rights of the working classes to participate in government, Law Day asks Americans to focus upon every American’s rights as laid out in the fundamental documents of American democracy: the Declaration of Independence and the federal Constitution. The declaration insists that Americans “find these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and guarantees the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The Bill of Rights amended to the Constitution codifies the rights of free speech, free press and fair trial.

Law Day celebrates the legal construct for the determination of rights that the revolutionary leaders of the 1770s, hoping to prevent the sort of class warfare that went on to rack Europe from 1789 to 1917, were so eager to create.

The post First “Law Day” observed appeared first on HISTORY.

Henry Ford’s Detroit-based automobile company had broken ground in its labor policies before. In early 1914, against a backdrop of widespread unemployment and increasing labor unrest, Ford announced that it would pay its male factory workers a minimum wage of $5 per eight-hour day, upped from a previous rate of $2.34 for nine hours (the policy was adopted for female workers in 1916). The news shocked many in the industry—at the time, $5 per day was nearly double what the average auto worker made—but turned out to be a stroke of brilliance, immediately boosting productivity along the assembly line and building a sense of company loyalty and pride among Ford’s workers.

The decision to reduce the workweek from six to five days had originally been made in 1922. According to an article published in The New York Times that March, Edsel Ford, Henry’s son and the company’s president, explained that “Every man needs more than one day a week for rest and recreation….The Ford Company always has sought to promote [an] ideal home life for its employees. We believe that in order to live properly every man should have more time to spend with his family.”

Henry Ford said of the decision: “It is high time to rid ourselves of the notion that leisure for workmen is either ‘lost time’ or a class privilege.” At Ford’s own admission, however, the five-day workweek was also instituted in order to increase productivity: Though workers’ time on the job had decreased, they were expected to expend more effort while they were there. Manufacturers all over the country, and the world, soon followed Ford’s lead, and the Monday-to-Friday workweek became standard practice.

The post Ford factory workers get 40-hour week appeared first on HISTORY.

The U-2 spy plane was the brainchild of the Central Intelligence Agency, and it was a sophisticated technological marvel. Traveling at altitudes of up to 70,000 feet, the aircraft was equipped with state-of-the-art photography equipment that could, the CIA boasted, take high-resolution pictures of headlines in Russian newspapers as it flew overhead. Flights over the Soviet Union began in mid-1956. The CIA assured President Eisenhower that the Soviets did not possess anti-aircraft weapons sophisticated enough to shoot down the high-altitude planes.

On May 1, 1960, a U-2 flight piloted by Francis Gary Powers disappeared while on a flight over Russia. The CIA reassured the president that, even if the plane had been shot down, it was equipped with self-destruct mechanisms that would render any wreckage unrecognizable and the pilot was instructed to kill himself in such a situation. Based on this information, the U.S. government issued a cover statement indicating that a weather plane had veered off course and supposedly crashed somewhere in the Soviet Union. With no small degree of pleasure, Khrushchev pulled off one of the most dramatic moments of the Cold War by producing not only the mostly-intact wreckage of the U-2, but also the captured pilot-very much alive. A chagrined Eisenhower had to publicly admit that it was indeed a U.S. spy plane.

On May 16, a major summit between the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France began in Paris. Issues to be discussed included the status of Berlin and nuclear arms control. As the meeting opened, Khrushchev launched into a tirade against the United States and Eisenhower and then stormed out of the summit. The meeting collapsed immediately and the summit was called off. Eisenhower considered the “stupid U-2 mess” one of the worst debacles of his presidency. The pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was released in 1962 in exchange for a captured Soviet spy.

The post American U-2 spy plane shot down over Soviet Union appeared first on HISTORY.