February 14 – Hours after learning the death of his sister, US speed skater Dan Jansen falls twice and fails to win a medal in the 500-meter race in the Calgary Winter Olympics.[1]
February 16 – Gunman Richard Farley kills seven people inside his former workplace, ESL Incorporated in Sunnyvale, California. He had been stalking colleague Laura Black who still worked there; however, she survived the shooting. Farley is currently on death row.
February 17 – U.S. Lieutenant Colonel William R. Higgins, serving with a United Nations group monitoring a truce in southern Lebanon, is kidnapped (he is later killed by his captors).
U.S. presidential candidate George Herbert Walker Bush defeats Bob Dole in numerous Republican primaries and caucuses on "Super Tuesday". The bipartisan primary/caucus calendar, designed by Democrats to help solidify their own nominee early, backfires when none of the six competing candidates are able to break out of the pack in the day's Democratic contests. Jesse Jackson, however, wins several Southern state primaries.
March 13 – Gallaudet University, a university for the deaf in Washington, D.C., elects Dr. I. King Jordan as the first deaf president in its history, following the Deaf President Now campaign, considered a turning point in the deaf civil rights movement.[2]
March 26 – U.S. presidential candidate Jesse Jackson defeats Michael Dukakis in the Michigan Democratic caucuses, becoming the frontrunner temporarily for the party's nomination. Richard Gephardt withdraws his candidacy after his campaign speeches against imported automobiles fail to earn him much support in Detroit.
Apriledit
April – The unemployment rate drops to 5.4%, the lowest since June 1974.
April 28 – Aloha Airlines Flight 243, a scheduled passenger flight to Honolulu, Hawaii originating from Hilo, Hawaii, suffers an explosive decompression after a portion of the aircraft’s roof towards front of the fuselage tore off during flight, resulting in the death of a flight attendant.[3] Everybody else onboard survives after the aircraft makes a successful emergency landing at Kahului Airport in Maui, Hawaii.[4]
May 14 – Bus collision near Carrollton, Kentucky: A drunk driver traveling in the wrong direction on Interstate 71 hits a converted school bus carrying a church youth group from Radcliff, Kentucky. The resulting fire kills 27 people, making it tied for first in the U.S. for most fatalities involving 2 vehicles to the present day. Coincidentally, the other 2-vehicle accident involving a bus that also killed 27 occurred in Prestonsburg, Kentucky thirty years prior.
June 14 – A small wildfire is started by a lightning strike in Montana, United States, near the boundary for Yellowstone National Park. The Storm Creek fire expands into the park, then merges with dozens of other drought-aggravated fires. Eventually, over 750,000 acres (3,000 km2) of Yellowstone – 36% of the park's area – burns before firefighters gain control in late September.[5]
June 28 – Four workers are asphyxiated at a metal-plating plant in Auburn, Indiana, in the worst confined-space industrial accident in U.S. history (a fifth victim dies two days later).
July 6 – The first reported medical waste on beaches in the Greater New York area (including hypodermic needles and syringes possibly infected with the AIDS virus) washes ashore on Long Island. Subsequent medical waste discoveries on beaches in Coney Island, Brooklyn and in Monmouth County, New Jersey, force the closure of numerous New York–area beaches in the middle of one of the hottest summers on record in the American Northeast.[6]
July 14 – Volkswagen closes its Westmoreland Assembly Plant after ten years of operation (the first factory built by a non-American automaker in the U.S.).
August 6–7 – Tompkins Square Park Police Riot in New York City: A riot erupts in Tompkins Square Park when police attempt to enforce a newly passed curfew for the park. Bystanders, artists, residents, homeless people and political activists are caught up in the police action, which takes place during the night of August 6 and into the early morning of August 7.
August 9 – Wrigley Field has its first night game of baseball, ending long opposition to lights at the field.
September 5 – With the US's largest thrift institution, American Savings and Loan Association, entering receivership, the Robert M. Bass Group (headed by Robert Bass) agrees to buy its good assets with US$1.7 billion in federal aid (completed December).[7]
September 17–October 2 – The United States participates in the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea and ranks in third place, bringing home 36 gold, 31 silver and 27 bronze medals for a total of 94 medals behind the Soviet Union in first place and East Germany in second.
November 11 – In Sacramento, California, police find a body buried in the lawn of sixty-year-old landlady Dorothea Puente. Seven bodies are eventually found and Puente is convicted of three murders and sentenced to life in prison.
December 14 – After Yasir Arafat renounces violence, the U.S. says it will open dialogue with the PLO.
December 16 – Perennial U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche is convicted of mail fraud.
December 19 – Gorbachev cuts short his visit to the United States and returns home to the Soviet Union, as thousands of people have died in an earthquake in Armenia.[12]
Drexel Burnham Lambert agrees to plead guilty to insider trading and other violations and pay penalties of US$650 million.[13]
Undatededit
The U.S. Drought of 1988 causes big crop damage in many states, impacts many portions of the United States and causes around $60 billion in damage. Multiple regions suffer in the conditions. Heat waves cause 4,800 to 17,000 excess deaths while scorching many areas of the United States during 1988.
Isidor Isaac Rabi, physicist, winner of Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944 for invention of the atomic beam magnetic resonance method of measuring magnetic properties of atoms and molecules (born 1898 in Poland)
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External linksedit
Media related to 1988 in the United States at Wikimedia Commons