TODAY IN WORLD HISTORY
Today is Saturday, Jan. 14, the 14th day of 2017. There are 351 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History
On this date • In 1784, the United States ratified the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War; Britain followed suit in April 1784.
• In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and French General Charles de Gaulle opened a wartime conference in Casablanca.
• In 1954, Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio were married at San Francisco City Hall. (The marriage lasted about nine months.)
• In 1963, George C. Wallace was sworn in as governor of Alabama with the pledge, “Segregation forever!” — a view Wallace later repudiated.
• In 1969, 27 people aboard the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, off Hawaii, were killed when a rocket warhead exploded, setting off a fire and additional explosions.
• In 1975, the House Internal Security Committee (formerly the House Un-American Activities Committee) was disbanded.
• In 1994, President Bill Clinton and Russian President Boris Yeltsin signed an accord to stop aiming missiles at any nation; the leaders joined Ukrainian President Leonid Kravchuk in signing an accord to dismantle the nuclear arsenal of Ukraine.
On Jan. 15 • In 1559, England’s Queen Elizabeth I was crowned in Westminster Abbey.
• In 1777, the people of New Connecticut declared their independence. (The republic later became the state of Vermont.)
• In 1892, the original rules of basketball, devised by James Naismith, were published for the first time in Springfield, Massachusetts, where the game originated.
• In 1929, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was born in Atlanta.
• In 1943, work was completed on the Pentagon, headquarters of the U.S. Department of War (now Defense).
• In 1947, the mutilated remains of 22-year-old Elizabeth Short, who came to be known as the “Black Dahlia,” were found in a vacant Los Angeles lot; her slaying remains unsolved.
• In 1961, a U.S. Air Force radar tower off the New Jersey coast collapsed into the Atlantic Ocean during a severe storm, killing all 28 men aboard.
• In 1976, Sara Jane Moore was sentenced to life in prison for her attempt on the life of President Gerald R. Ford in San Francisco. (Moore was released on the last day of 2007.)
• In 2009, US Airways Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger ditched his Airbus 320 in the Hudson River after a flock of birds disabled both engines; all 155 people aboard survived.
On Jan. 16 • In 27 B.C., Caesar Augustus was declared the first Emperor of the Roman Empire by the Senate.
In 1547, Ivan IV of Russia (popularly known as “Ivan the Terrible”) was crowned Czar.
In 1865, Union Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman decreed that 400,000 acres of land in the South would be divided into 40acre lots and given to former slaves. (The order, later revoked by President Andrew Johnson, is believed to have inspired the expression, “Forty acres and a mule.”)
In 1920, Prohibition began in the United States as the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution took effect, one year to the day after its ratification. (It was later repealed by the 21st Amendment.)
In 1957, three B-52’s took off from Castle Air Force Base in California on the first non-stop, round-the-world flight by jet planes, which lasted 45 hours and 19 minutes. Classical music conductor Arturo Toscanini died in New York at age 89.
In 1991, the White House announced the start of Operation Desert Storm to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. (Allied forces prevailed on Feb. 28, 1991.)