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1980Todd Dunivant, American soccer player[†]
Todd Dunivant is an American former soccer player who played 13 years in Major League Soccer winning 5 MLS Cup trophies. After retirement he spearheaded the San Francisco Deltas professional soccer team as the Director of Soccer Operations and Business Development —winning the NASL Championship in its expansion season. He currently serves as the general manager of Sacramento Republic FC.
1980Ceylan Ertem, Turkish singer[†]
Ceylan Ertem is a Turkish singer-songwriter.
1980Tony Smith, American sculptor and educator (born 1912)[†]
Anthony Peter Smith was an American sculptor, painter, architectural designer, and a noted art theorist. As a leading sculptor in the 1960s and 1970s, Smith is often associated with the Minimalist art movement.
1980Richard Chase, American cannibalistic serial killer and necrophile (born 1950)[†]
Richard Trenton Chase was an American serial killer, cannibal, and necrophile who killed six people in Sacramento, California, from December 1977 to January 1978. He was nicknamed The Vampire of Sacramento because he drank his victims' blood and cannibalized their remains.
1980Witnesses report the first of several sightings of unexplained lights near RAF Woodbridge, in Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England, United Kingdom, an incident called "Britain's Roswell".[†]
The Rendlesham Forest incident was a series of reported sightings of unexplained lights near Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk, England, in December 1980, which became linked with UFO landings. The events occurred just outside RAF Woodbridge, which was used at the time by the United States Air Force (USAF). USAF personnel, including deputy base commander Lieutenant Colonel Charles I. Halt, claimed to see things they described as a UFO.
DETROIT, Dec. 25--In a move that is drawing protests from dealers, the General Motors Corporation has reportedly decided to limit the Cadillac version of its new subcompact "J" car to a small minority of its outlets when the model is introduced next spring.
THE city's jazz scene is staying close to the middle of the road in the final weekend of 1980--nothing very far out, nothing very far back.
TEHERAN, Iran, Dec. 25-American hostages attended makeshift Christmas services here today for the second year, with any hopes that they might have had for release anytime soon apparently dashed again.
Major changes in fire-safety requirements for thousands of apartment buildings, hotels and department stores in New York City are being considered by top officials of the Fire and Buildings Departments.
PEKING, Dec. 25--The son of a former senior Communist Party leader who died after persecution during the Cultural Revolution demanded today that Jiang Qing, widow of Mao Zedong, be given the death sentence in her trial before a special high court.
DORTMUND, West Germany-The eastern stretches of the Ruhr area are hill country. At the center is Dortmund, a city rebuilt after British and American bombers, seeking out industrial targets during World War II, laid waste to three-quarters of its buildings.
Much of the United States spent Christmas shivering as subzero cold driven by gale-force gusts of wind set records from New York to Chicago.
Despite a marked improvement in second-half earnings for most carriers, the United States airlines as a whole will look back on 1980 with the same sort of enthusiasm that pilots have for fog, turbulent air or short runways.
A 27-year-old man was arrested on Christmas Eve in South Carolina on charges of fatally shooting a Port Authority police officer Monday after an argument over a lighted cigarette on a PATH commuter train.
Grand Adm. Karl Doenitz, who presided over Nazi Germany's unconditional surrender in World II as Adolf Hitler's personally appointed successor, has died at the age of 89, his family announced yesterday in Hamburg, West Germany.
I was wondering if anything interesting on the news was going on when I was born, and decided to create this website for fun. The purpose is to show people what was going on when they were born. With this website I've found out that it was a pretty slow news day on my birthday, but I bet it would feel cool to know a historical event happened on your birthday.
The data used in this project is provided by the New York Times API. They have by far the best API I was able to find, with articles dating back to the 1950s. There weren't any other major newspapers that had an API with close to as much data. The closest was the Guardian API, but theirs only went back to the 1990s. I decided to only use articles from the New York Times because their API was by far the best. This tool works if you have a birthday after the 1950s or so.
Some important dates in history I'd recommend looking up on this website are:
These historical events are just a few examples of the fascinating moments in history you can explore through this tool. Whether you're interested in your own birthday, significant historical dates, or just curious about what was making headlines on any given day, this website offers a unique window into the past through the lens of contemporary news coverage.
You can read more on our blog.