TODAY IN U.S. HISTORY
Today is Tuesday, Dec. 13, the 348th day of 2016. There are 18 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History
On Dec. 13, 1981, authorities in Poland imposed martial law in a crackdown on the Solidarity labor movement. (Martial law formally ended in 1983.)
On this date
• In 1642, Dutch navigator Abel Tasman sighted present-day New Zealand.
• In 1769, Dartmouth College in New Hampshire received its charter.
• In 1862, Union forces led by Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside launched futile attacks against entrenched Confederate soldiers during the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg; the soundly defeated Northern troops withdrew two days later.
• In 1918, President Woodrow Wilson arrived in France, becoming the first chief executive to visit Europe while in office.
• In 1928, George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” had its premiere at Carnegie Hall in New York.
• In 1937, the Chinese city of Nanjing fell to Japanese forces; what followed was a massacre of war prisoners, soldiers and citizens. (China maintains as many as 300,000 people were killed; Japan says the toll was far less. Estimates from outside sources range from 40,000 to 300,000 deaths as well as other crimes.)
• In 1944, during World War II, the light cruiser USS Nashville was badly damaged in a Japanese kamikaze attack off Negros Island in the Philippines that claimed 133 lives.
• In 1962, the United States launched Relay 1, a communications satellite which retransmitted television, telephone and digital signals.
• In 1974, Malta became a republic. George Harrison visited the White House, where he met President Gerald R. Ford.
• In 1994, an American Eagle commuter plane crashed short of Raleigh-Durham International Airport in North Carolina, killing 15 of the 20 people on board.
• In 1996, the U.N. Security Council chose Kofi Annan of Ghana to become the world body’s seventh secretary-general.
• In 2003, Saddam Hussein was captured by U.S. forces while hiding in a hole under a farmhouse in Adwar, Iraq, near his hometown of Tikrit.
Ten years ago
President George W. Bush held high-level talks at the Pentagon, after which he said he would “not be rushed” into a decision on a strategy change for Iraq. Sen. Tim Johnson, D-S.D., underwent emergency surgery after suffering bleeding in his brain. (Johnson later resumed his Senate duties.) Lamar Hunt, 74, the owner of football’s Kansas City Chiefs who coined the term “Super Bowl,” died in Dallas.
Five years ago
Early sound recordings by Alexander Graham Bell that were packed away at the Smithsonian Institution for more than a century were played publicly for the first time using new technology that read the sound with light and a 3D camera. (In one recording, a man recites part of Hamlet’s Soliloquy; on another, a voice recites the numbers 1 through 6.) In the Penn State child sex abuse scandal, ex-assistant coach Jerry Sandusky waived a preliminary hearing on the charges, which he denied. (Sandusky was later convicted of abusing several boys, some on campus.) In Liege, Belgium, six people were killed when a 33-year-old man threw grenades and fired on a crowd of people in the city’s main square before committing suicide. In Florence, Italy, a man opened fire in an outdoor market, killing two vendors from Senegal, then critically wounding three other Senegalese immigrants before killing himself.
One year ago
Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front collapsed in French regional elections, failing to take a single region after dominating the first round of voting.