January 15 – Elizabeth Short, an aspiring actress nicknamed the "Black Dahlia", is found brutally murdered in a vacant lot in Los Angeles. The case is never solved.
An explosion at the O'Connor Electro-Plating Company in Los Angeles, California, leaves 17 dead, 100 buildings damaged, and a 22-foot-deep (6.7m) crater in the ground.
April 15 – Jackie Robinson becomes the first African American to play Major League Baseball since the 1880s.
April 16
Texas City Disaster: The ammonium nitrate cargo of French-registered Liberty shipSSGrandcamp explodes in Texas City, Texas, killing at least 581, including all but one member of the city fire department, injuring at least 5,000 and destroying 20 city blocks. Of the dead, remains of 113 are never found and 63 are unidentifiable.
July 5 - Larry Doby becomes the first African American to ever play baseball in the American League, and the first in Major League Baseball after Jackie Robinson
September 17–21 – The 1947 Fort Lauderdale Hurricane in southeastern Florida, and also in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, causes widespread damage and kills 51 people.
October–November – Great Fires of 1947: Forest fires in Maine consume more than 200,000 acres of wooded land statewide, including over 17,000 acres on Mount Desert Island alone. 16 persons are killed and more than 1,000 homes destroyed in the blazes, with total property damage exceeding $23 million.
November 2 – In California, designer Howard Hughes pilots the maiden flight of the Hughes H-4 Hercules flying boat known as "Spruce Goose", the largest fixed-wing aircraft ever built; the flight lasts only eight minutes and the craft is never flown again.
November 6 – The program Meet the Press makes its television debut on the NBC-TV network in the United States.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
