Today in history—December 8

1643: John Pym, the Parliamentary leader whose opposition to King Charles I was first sparked by the Ship Money tax on his Providence Island Company, dies of cancer shortly after negotiating the Solemn League and Covenant with the Scots Presbyterians.

1765: Inventor and entrepreneur Eli Whitney is born in Westboro, Massachusetts. At age 28 he will invent the cotton gin, the machine that will make Southern cotton a viable industry, but he will make on money off that invention. He will instead get rich after inventing a new manufacturing method for muskets, using interchangeable parts.

1861: Industrialist William Crapo Durant is born. He will make a fortune by inventing a new kind of horse-drawn carriage, but will see the writing on the wall; after meeting a young engineer named David Buick, he decides to bankroll the upstart Buick Company in 1905. A few years later he will launch a bigger enterprise, which he calls General Motors.

1886: Twenty-six independent craft unions unite to form the American Federation of Labor; Samuel Gompers is elected the first AFL president

1898: Young Katie learns that she will get the money after all; the Nebraska Supreme Court decides Ricketts v. Scothorn.

1903: Herbert Spencer, the philosopher and sociologist whose Social Statics were not enacted by the 14th amendment of the U.S. Constitution, dies two years before Justice Holmes can sneer at him in Lochner v. New York.

1923: The German government at Weimar institutes a salary and price freeze.

1936: The NAACP files suit to challenge differential pay scales for black and white school teachers.

1962: A newspaper strike begins in New York City. It will run for 114 days but will unfortunately end.

1967: The struggling California Seals of the National Hockey League change their name to “Oakland Seals.” It doesn’t help.