Black Friday (shopping) corner the gold market. When President Grant learned of this manipulation, he ordered the Treasury to release a large supply of gold, which halted the run and caused prices to drop by eighteen percent. Fortunes were made and lost in a single day, and the president's own brother-in-law, Abel Corbin, was ruined. The earliest known use of "Black Friday" to refer to the day after Thanksgiving occurs in the journal, "Factory Management and Maintenance", for November 1951, and again in 1952. Here it referred to the practice of workers calling in sick on the day after Thanksgiving, in order to
Black Friday bushfires of the total area burnt the Black Friday fires are the second largest, burning 2 million hectares, with the Black Thursday fires of 1851 having burnt an estimated 5 million hectares. Putting aside large conflagrations of cities like the Great Fire of Meireki or the Great Fire of London, perhaps the world's worst bushfire was at Peshtigo in Wisconsin in 1871, which burnt nearly 1.2 million acres, destroyed twelve communities and killed between 1500-2500 people. Now largely forgotten, Peshtigo was overshadowed by the Great Fire of Chicago that occurred on the same day. Black Friday bushfires The Black Friday bushfires