1961: The New York Stock Exchange delists five stocks in one day. All are railroad or sugar companies based in Cuba, and their assets have been expropriated by the new government of Fidel Castro.

"Today in NYSE History," at www.nyse.com/about/TodayInNYSE.html

1959: Less than three years after breaking the 500 mark, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closes above 600 for the first time, finishing the day at 602.21.

John A. Prestbo, ed., The Market's Measure: An Illustrated History of America Told through the Dow Jones Industrial Average (Dow Jones, New York, 1999), p. 75.

1852: A locomotive of the Michigan Southern railroad puffs into Chicago, connecting the breadbasket of the world directly with the Eastern U.S. for the first time. Instead of more than two weeks by horse, coach and canalboat, it now takes just two days by rail to travel from New York City to Chicago. Goods, money and people can now flow between the two booming cities faster than anyone had ever imagined.

William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1991), p. 76.

1848: Edward H. Harriman is born in Hempstead, N.Y., to an Episcopal minister and his wife. He starts on Wall Street at age 14, working as an office boy in a brokerage firm. Harriman marries into a railroading family and by age 50 commands the Union Pacific and Southern Pacific railways, making him one of the most powerful railroad barons in the world. When Harriman dies in 1908, the Dow Jones Railway Average falls 3%.

1795: Robert Morris, financier of the American Revolution, creates the North American Land Co. Its prospectus guarantees that the company will pay dividends of at least 6% a year from the "extreamly profitable" resale of 6 million shares of land. The shares could easily grow to "four or five, or more likely ten times" the IPO price "without either Risque or trouble." It turns out there is plenty of "risque," as the stock crashes and Morris ends up in debtors' prison less than three years later.

Charles Royster, The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company: A Story of George Washington's Times (Knopf, New York, 1999), pp. 375-376, 388-389.