This Year in History:
1997
Discover what happened in this year with HISTORY’s summaries of major events, anniversaries, famous births and notable deaths.
On January 16, 1997, comedian and TV star Bill Cosby’s 27-year-old son Ennis Cosby is murdered after he stops to fix a flat tire along California’s Interstate 405 in Los Angeles. The 405, which runs some 70 miles from Irvine to San Fernando, is known as one of the planet’s busiest and most congested roadways. […]
The Republic of Ireland legally grants a divorce for the first time following a 1995 referendum. The first divorce in Ireland, granted to a terminally ill man who wished to marry his new partner, was a harbinger of the decline of the Catholic Church’s power over the Republic. The Irish Constitution of 1937 specifically forbade […]
The day after her unanimous confirmation by the U.S. Senate, Madeleine Albright is sworn in as America’s first female secretary of state by Vice President Al Gore at the White House. As head of the U.S. State Department, Albright was the highest ranking female official in U.S. history, a distinction that led some to declare […]
In South Africa, four apartheid-era police officers, appearing before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, admit to the 1977 killing of Stephen Biko, a leader of the South African “Black consciousness” movement. In 1969, Biko, a medical student, founded an organization for South Africa’s Black students to combat the minority government’s racist apartheid policies and to […]
An episode of the hit TV sitcom “Seinfeld” titled “The Pothole” airs for the first time on February 20, 1997; it includes a story line in which the character Kramer adopts a stretch of the fictional Arthur Burghardt Expressway through the real-life Adopt-a-Highway program. The roots of the Adopt-a-Highway program date back to 1984, when […]
Christopher Wallace, a.k.a Biggie Smalls, a.k.a. the Notorious B.I.G., is shot to death at a stoplight in Los Angeles. The murder was thought to be the culmination of an ongoing feud between rap music artists from the East and West coasts. Just six months earlier, rapper Tupac Shakur was killed when he was shot while […]
On March 10, 1997, the fledgling Warner Brothers (WB) television network airs the inaugural episode of what will become its first bonafide hit show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy‘s creator, Joss Whedon, developed the series from an original script he had written for the big screen a number of years earlier. The 1992 movie, starring Kristy […]
On March 11, 1997, Paul McCartney, a former member of the most successful rock band in history, The Beatles, is knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his “services to music.” The 54-year-old from Liverpool became Sir Paul in a centuries-old ceremony of pomp and solemnity at Buckingham Palace in central London. Fans waited outside in […]
Following an anonymous tip, police enter a mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, an exclusive suburb of San Diego, California, and discover 39 victims of a mass suicide. The deceased—21 women and 18 men of varying ages—were all found lying peaceably in matching dark clothes and Nike sneakers and had no noticeable signs of blood or […]
On April 13, 1997, 21-year-old Tiger Woods wins the prestigious Masters Tournament by a record 12 strokes in Augusta, Georgia. It was Woods’ first victory in one of golf’s four major championships—the U.S. Open, the British Open, the PGA Championship and the Masters—and the greatest performance by a professional golfer in more than a century. […]
Tiger Woods became the first African American to win a major, and the youngest to wear the green jacket when he aced his first Masters Golf Tournament on April 13th. This video clip with Russ Mitchell recaps the historical events of April 13. From This Day In History, this clip also includes the beginning of […]
On April 15, 1997, the 50 anniversary of his first Major League Baseball game, the league retires Jackie Robinson’s number, 42. Robinson, whose breaking of the “color barrier” in 1947 was a major moment in the history of racial integration in the United States, is the only player in MLB history to have his number […]
In Lima, Peru, Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori orders a commando assault on the Japanese ambassador’s home, hoping to free 72 hostages held for more than four months by armed members of the Tupac Amaru leftist rebel movement. On December 16, 1996, 14 Tupac Amaru terrorists, disguised as waiters and caterers, slipped into the home of […]
Andrew Cunanan kills Jeffrey Trail by beating him to death with a claw hammer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Trail’s murder set Cunanan off on a nationwide killing spree that ended in July when he killed himself on a houseboat in Miami Beach. Cunanan spent most of his adult life as the kept companion of wealthy older […]
On April 30, 1997, at exactly 12:11 pm, London’s iconic Big Ben clock stops ticking. For 43 minutes, the most famous clock in the world, which strikes the note of E every hour, failed to keep time. According to Britain’s Daily Telegraph, engineers traced the problem to the mechanism that controls the hands on the […]
On April 30, 1997, in a widely publicized episode of the ABC sitcom “Ellen,” TV character Ellen Morgan (played by Ellen DeGeneres) announces that she is gay. DeGeneres, a former stand-up comedian who was born on January 26, 1958, became part of the ensemble cast of the ABC series “These Friends of Mine” in 1994. […]
After 18 years of Conservative rule, British voters give the Labour Party, led by Tony Blair, a landslide victory in British parliamentary elections. In the poorest Conservative Party showing since 1832, Prime Minister John Major was rejected in favor of Scottish-born Blair, who at age 43 became the youngest British prime minister in more than […]
The body of William Reese, 45, a cemetery caretaker, is found in rural Pennsville, New Jersey, on May 9, 1997. He had been shot in the head with a Golden Saber .38-caliber bullet. Police soon determined that the killer was Andrew Cunanan, a 27-year-old man already wanted for three murders. It appeared that Cunanan had […]
On May 11, 1997, chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov resigns after 19 moves in a game against Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer developed by scientists at IBM. This was the sixth and final game of their match, which Kasparov lost two games to one, with three draws. Kasparov, a chess prodigy from Azerbaijan, was a skillful […]
A three-year-old boy dies of avian influenza in Hong Kong on May 21, 1997. By the time the outbreak was controlled, six people were dead and 1.6 million domestic fowl were destroyed. The young boy, the first victim of the flu outbreak, had been hospitalized six days earlier with severe coughing and fever. He had […]
