The following dates are important for an editor to know and should be committed to memory:

July 4, 1776 — Declaration of Independence signed

July 1-3, 1863 — Battle of Gettysburg

November 19, 1863 — President Lincoln’s Gettysburg address

April 14, 1865 — Lincoln shot at Ford’s Theater; died April 15

November 11, 1918 — World War I ends

October 29, 1929 — Stock market crash begims Great Depression

September 1, 1939 — Germany invades Poland

December 7, 1941 — Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor

June 6, 1944 — D-Day; allies invade Europe

August 6, 1945 — Atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima

December 1, 1955 — Rosa Parks refuses to give up seat on Montgomery bus, begins modern Civil Rights movement

February 20, 1962 — John Glenn is first American to orbit the earth

September 15, 1963 — 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham bombed

November 22, 1963 — President John F. Kennedy shot

April 4, 1968 — Martin Luther King killed in Memphis

July 20, 1969 — Neil Armstrong first man to walk on the moon

May 4, 1970 — Four students killed at Kent State

May 15, 1972 — George Wallace shot

June 17, 1972 — Burglars break into to the Democratic party headquarters at Watergate apartment complex in Washington

August 9, 1974 — Nixon resigns over Watergate revelations

August 16, 1977 — Elvis Presley died

January 28, 1986 — Challenger explodes shortly after liftoff

April 19, 1995 — Federal building in Oklahoma City bombed

January 1998 — First reports surface of  President Bill Clinton’s affair with a White House intern; scandal eventually led to U.S, Senate impeachment trial in n 1999

September 11, 2001 — Terrorists hijack four airplanes in the U.S., crashing them all; two fly into the World Trade Center towers in New York City, causing them to collapse; a third flies into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.; a fourth crashes into a rural area in Pennsylvania

December 26, 2004 — An earthquake in the Indian Ocean causes a giant tsunami, killing more than 150,000 people and leaving many more homeless

Inclusive dates:

1861-1865 — American Civil War

1903 — Wright brothers first flight

1914-1918 — World War I

1919-1933 — Prohibition

1925 — Scopes monkey trial in Tennessee

1930s — the Great Depression

1939-1945 — World War II

October 1962 — Cuban missile crisis

Adapted from The Complete Editor