On this date
In 1612, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei observed the planet Neptune but mistook it for a star. (Neptune wasn’t officially discovered until 1846 by Johann Gottfried Galle.)
In 1832, John C. Calhoun became the first vice president of the United States to resign, stepping down because of differences with President Andrew Jackson.
In 1945, Congress officially recognized the Pledge of Allegiance.
In 1973, the book “Gulag Archipelago,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s exposé of the Soviet prison system, was first published in Paris.
In 1981, Elizabeth Jordan Carr, the first American “testtube” baby, was born in Norfolk, Va.
In 1989, Alexander Dubcek, the former Czechoslovak Communist leader who was deposed in a Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion in 1968, was named president of the country’s parliament.
In 1991, nine people died in a crush of people trying to get into a rap celebrity basketball game at City College in New York.
Ten years ago: President George W. Bush, at his Texas ranch, worked on designing a new U.S. policy in Iraq.
Five years ago: North Korea’s new leader, Kim Jong Un, escorted his father’s hearse in an elaborate state funeral, bowing somberly and saluting in front of tens of thousands of citizens who wailed and stamped their feet in grief for Kim Jong Il.
One year ago: A grand jury in Cleveland declined to indict a white rookie police officer in the killing of 12year-old Tamir Rice, a black youngster who was shot while playing with what turned out to be a pellet gun.