On this date

1475 — Italian artist and poet Michelangelo was born in Caprese in the Republic of Florence. 1853 — Verdi’s opera “La Traviata” premiered in Venice, Italy. 1857 — The U.S. Supreme Court, in Dred Scott v. Sandford, ruled 7-2 that Scott, a slave, was not an American citizen and therefore could not sue for his freedom in federal court. 1933 — A national bank holiday declared by President Franklin D. Roosevelt aimed at calming panicked depositors went into effect. Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, wounded in an attempt on Roosevelt’s life the previous month, died at a Miami hospital at age 59. 1944 — U.S. heavy bombers staged the first fullscale American raid on Berlin during World War II. 1953 — Georgy Malenkov was named premier of the Soviet Union a day after the death of Josef Stalin. 1967 — The daughter of Josef Stalin, Svetlana Alliluyeva, appeared at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi and declared her intention to defect to the West. Singer-actor Nelson Eddy, 65, died in Palm Beach, Florida. 1970 — A bomb being built inside a Greenwich Village townhouse by the radical Weathermen accidentally went off, destroying the house and killing three group members. 1983 — In a case that drew much notoriety, a woman was gang-raped atop a pool table in a tavern in New Bedford, Massachusetts, called Big Dan’s; four men were later convicted of the attack. 1988 — The board of trustees at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., a liberal arts college for the deaf, selected Elisabeth Zinser, a hearing woman, to be school president; outraged students shut down the campus, forcing selection of a deaf president, I. King Jordan, instead. 1998 — The U.S. Army honored three Americans who risked their lives and turned their weapons on fellow soldiers to stop the slaughter of Vietnamese villagers at My Lai in 1968. 2016 — Former first lady Nancy Reagan died in Los Angeles at age 94.