1857 St Martin’s, Literature: Charles Dickens read ‘A Christmas Carol’ for his first public reading.
1906 DC, Politics: Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act and also the Pure Food and Drug Act partly in response to Upton Sinclair’s grotesque exposés in the novel ‘The Jungle’ and in his journalism. The cover below is from the copy I read in college. Enough to make one a vegetarian.
1908 Tunguska (Russia), Science: A giant fireball caused by a gigantic meteoroid flattened an estimated 80 million trees over 2000 square kilometres in Yeniseysk, the largest extraterrestrial impact ever. It struck an area with virtually no human inhabitants., certainly none there survived the impact.
1997 London, Literature: J.K. Rowling published the first Harry Potter novel, ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.’ It has since sold 120 million copies and counting. One of my students wrote an amusing pastiche of this book for an assignment, titled Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Phone. The real magic here was Rowling’s achievement in getting kids to read books.
2016 Älmhult (Sweden), Commerce: The Ikea Museum opened on the site of the very first of its stores. The last piece remains missing. Visitors are channeled through every exhibit with no short-cuts or escape.
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