On this date
In 1792, French highwayman Nicolas Jacques Pelletier was the first person to be executed by the guillotine.
In 1917, legendary jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald was born in Newport News, Va.
In 1945, delegates from some 50 countries gathered in San Francisco to organize the United Nations. In 1959, the St. Lawrence Seaway opened to shipping. In 1983, 10-year-old Samantha Smith of Manchester, Maine, received a reply from Soviet leader Yuri Andropov to a letter she’d written expressing her concerns about nuclear war; Andropov gave assurances that the Soviet Union did not want war, and invited Samantha to visit his country, a trip she made in July.
In 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope was deployed in orbit from the space shuttle Discovery. (It was later discovered that the telescope’s primary mirror was flawed, requiring the installation of corrective components to achieve optimal focus.)
In 2002, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes of the Grammy-winning trio TLC died in an SUV crash in Honduras; she was 30. Ten years ago: The Dow Jones industrial average topped 13,000 for the first time, ending the day at 13,089.89.
Five years ago: The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on Arizona’s tough immigration law. (A divided court later threw out major parts of the law.)
One year ago: The City of Cleveland reached a $6 million settlement in a lawsuit over the death of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy shot by a white police officer while playing with a pellet gun outside a recreation center.