Today in history

On this date:

In 1617, Canada’s first farmer, Louis Hebert, arrived at Tadoussac with his wife and their three children.

In 1777, the Continental Congress in Philadelphia adopted the Stars and Stripes as the national flag.

In 1808, the first Methodist church in Montreal was built.

In 1872, the Canadian Pacific Railway’s general charter was passed by the Dominion parliament.

In 1919, British pilots John William Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown took off from St. John’s, Nfld., for the first non-stop transatlantic flight. They landed in a peat bog at Galway, Ireland, after flying about 3,100 kilometres in just over 16 hours. The flight won them a $10,000 prize offered by the London Daily Mail, and both were awarded knighthoods.

In 1928, Che Guevara was born in Rosario, Argentina. He was a theoretician and tactician of guerrilla warfare, a prominent Communist figure in the Cuban Revolution (1956-59), and later a guerrilla leader in South America. He was executed Oct. 9, 1967, after he was captured by the Bolivian army while leading a revolt.

In 1940, Auschwitz, the largest of the Nazi concentration camps, was first opened near Krakow, Poland. Before its liberation by the Allies in 1945, over three million Jews would be murdered there.