TODAY IN WORLD HISTORY
Today is Tuesday, Oct. 3, the 276th day of 2017. There are 89 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History On Oct. 3, 1967, folk singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie, the Dust Bowl Troubadour best known for “This Land Is Your Land,” died in New York of complications from Huntington’s disease; he was 55.
On this date
• In 1789, President George Washington declared Nov. 26, 1789, a day of Thanksgiving to express gratitude for the creation of the United States of America.
• In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday in November Thanksgiving Day.
• In 1922, Rebecca L. Felton, DGa., became the first woman to be appointed to the U.S. Senate (however, she served only a day).
• In 1932, Iraq became independent of British administration.
• In 1941, Adolf Hitler declared in a speech in Berlin that Russia had been “broken” and would “never rise again.” ‘’The Maltese Falcon” — the version starring Humphrey Bogart and directed by John Huston — premiered in New York.
• In 1951, the New York Giants captured the National League pennant by a score of 5-4 as Bobby Thomson hit a three-run homer off Ralph Branca of the Brooklyn Dodgers in the “shot heard ‘round the world.”
• In 1962, astronaut Wally Schirra became the fifth American to fly in space as he blasted off from Cape Canaveral aboard the Sigma 7 on a 9-hour flight.
• In 1974, Frank Robinson was named major league baseball’s first black manager as he was placed in charge of the Cleveland Indians.
• In 1981, Irish nationalists at the Maze Prison near Belfast, Northern Ireland, ended seven months of hunger strikes that had claimed 10 lives.
• In 1992, Barack Obama married Michelle Robinson at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.
• In 1995, the jury in the O.J. Simpson murder trial in Los Angeles found the former football star not guilty of the 1994 slayings of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ronald Goldman (however, Simpson was later found liable for damages in a civil trial).
• In 2008, O.J. Simpson was found guilty of robbing two sports-memorabilia dealers at gunpoint in a Las Vegas hotel room. (Simpson was later sentenced to nine to 33 years in prison; he was granted parole in July 2017 and released from prison on Sunday.)
Ten years ago North Korea agreed to provide a complete list of its nuclear programs and disable its facilities at its main reactor complex by Dec. 31, 2007 (however, North Korea later said it would move to restore its nuclear reactor, saying the United States had failed to follow through with promised incentives). President George W. Bush quietly vetoed expansion of a children’s health insurance program.
Five years ago An aggressive Mitt Romney sparred with President Barack Obama on the economy and domestic issues in their first campaign debate. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton promised a full and transparent probe of the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans.
One year ago The United States suspended diplomatic contacts with Russia over failed efforts to end the war in Syria while President Vladimir Putin put on hold a deal with the U.S. on disposing weapons-grade plutonium. Yoshinori Ohsumi of Japan won the Nobel Prize in medicine for illuminating how cells dispose of and recycle their garbage — research that might pay off in treatments for diseases like cancer, Parkinson’s and Type 2 diabetes. President Barack Obama and actor Leonardo DiCaprio teamed up on the White House South Lawn for the “South by South Lawn” festival of technology and music to sound a call for urgent action to combat climate change.