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On the night of December 8, 1980, music superstar John Lennon, a former member of the influential and phenomenally successful 1960’s rock group the Beatles, was shot to death outside his New York City residence by Mark David Chapman. Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, had been returning to their home from the Record Plant, a New York City recording studio.

On Thursday, July 6, 1933, more than forty-nine thousand enthusiastic spectators jammed into Chicago’s Comiskey Park to watch top players from both the American and National Leagues compete in the first ever All-Star Game. The American League emerged victorious, 4-2. Arch Ward, sports editor of the Chicago Tribune, had conceived of the game as the once-in-a-lifetime battle between baseball’s best players. A native of Illinois’s Kankakee County, Ward had been publicity director for legendary Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne and sports editor of the Rockford Star before coming to the Tribune in 1925.

On February 25, 1964, one of the most legendary, successful, and controversial careers in professional sports was launched when heavyweight boxer Cassius Clay successfully dethroned the champion Sonny Liston. Shortly thereafter, Clay changed his name to Muhammad Ali and his religion to Islam and embarked on a two-decade-long career as one of the greatest prizefighters in the history of the sport and one of the most recognizable persons around the globe.

The first of a series of horror films inspired by Mary Shelley’s century-old novel, Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) were landmark films in several respects. First and foremost, they firmly established horror as a reliable film genre along with other types, such as Westerns, comedies, and dramas. The films rescued tottering Universal Pictures from financial disaster and helped it hold its own against other Hollywood studios. The two films made the British-born actor Boris Karloff—who played the artificially created monster (Frankenstein was the scientist)—one of the biggest film stars in the world and stamped him as the successor to the deceased Lon Chaney as a genius of characterization and a master of disguise. The films also made household names out of several others who were involved with their production, such as director James Whale, actors Colin Clive and Dwight Frye, and Universal make-up artist Jack Pierce.