1992: You can tell what a society was like by its biggest monuments: Rome had its Coliseum, Egypt its pyramids, China its Great Wall. Today, the U.S. gets a monument sure to puzzle future archeologists, as the world's largest shopping center, the $650-million, 4.2-million-square-foot Mall of America, opens in Bloomington, Minn.

1987: Alan Greenspan takes office as Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

1950: Steve Wozniak, future co-inventor of the Apple computer, is born.

1928: Accepting the Republican presidential nomination, Herbert Hoover declares: "We in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing from among us?. We shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from the nation." Unfortunately, just over one year later, the Great Depression arrives, proving Hoover tragically wrong.

Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1997, reprint of 1931 ed.), p. 229;Edward Angly, Oh Yeah? (Fraser Publishing Co., Burlington, VT, 1992 ed.), p. 9