This Day in American History: Babe Ruth Breaks the Home Run Record

On this day in 1920, a big kid from Baltimore hit two home runs in one afternoon and rewrote what anyone thought was possible in baseball.

On July 19, 1920, in the second game of a doubleheader against the Chicago White Sox at the Polo Grounds, Babe Ruth hit his 30th home run of the season off pitcher Dickey Kerr, breaking his own single-season home run record of 29, which he had set the year before with the Boston Red Sox. He wasn't done -- Ruth hit a second homer later in the same game, pushing his total to 31 and leaving the record even further out of reach for anyone else.

It was Ruth's first season with the Yankees after being sold by the Red Sox that winter, and fans at the Polo Grounds had come as much to witness history as to watch the game itself. Ruth went on to finish the 1920 season with a jaw-dropping 54 home runs -- more than any other entire team in the American League hit that year. He wasn't finished breaking his own record, either: he hit 59 in 1921, then 60 in 1927, a mark that stood until Roger Maris finally topped it in 1961.

Babe Ruth didn't just break baseball's records. He obliterated them so thoroughly that no one else came within shouting distance for four decades -- and in doing so, he turned the home run into the sport's defining moment and made himself the most famous athlete in American history.

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Also on this day:

• 1812 -- American forces repel a British squadron at the First Battle of Sacket's Harbor, New York, the first engagement of the War of 1812.

• 1848 -- The Seneca Falls Convention opens in New York, launching the American women's suffrage movement.

• 1921 -- George Washington Carver arrives in Dearborn, Michigan, at the invitation of Henry Ford.

• 1963 -- NASA test pilot Joe Walker flies the X-15 to the edge of space.

• 1969 -- Apollo 11 enters lunar orbit, one day before the historic Moon landing.

Two swings, thirty-one home runs, and a legend who made the impossible look routine. That's baseball, and that's America.

Source: Society for American Baseball Research, National Baseball Hall of Fame