Today in History
Today’s highlight:
On Oct. 3, 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.
On this date:
1863: President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed the last Thursday in November Thanksgiving Day.
1941: Adolf Hitler declared in a speech in Berlin that Russia had been “broken” and would “never rise again.”
1961: “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” also starring Mary Tyler Moore, made its debut on CBS.
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.
1970: The National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, was established under the Department of Commerce.
1974: Frank Robinson was named major league baseball’s first Black manager as he was placed in charge of the Cleveland Indians.
1981: Irish nationalists at the Maze Prison near Belfast, Northern Ireland, ended seven months of hunger strikes that had claimed 10 lives.
2001: The Senate approved an agreement normalizing trade between the United States and Vietnam.
2003: A tiger attacked magician Roy Horn of duo “Siegfried & Roy” during a performance in Las Vegas, leaving the superstar illusionist in critical condition on his 59th birthday.
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 in October of that year.
2017: President Donald Trump, visiting Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, congratulated the U.S. island territory for escaping the higher death toll of what he called “a real catastrophe like Katrina;” at a church used to distribute supplies, Trump handed out flashlights and tossed rolls of paper towels into the friendly crowd.
Ten years ago: Ruling-party candidate Dilma Rousseff, trying to become Brazil’s first female leader, fell short of getting a majority of votes in presidential elections. Rousseff prevailed in a runoff against her centrist rival, Jose Serra.
Five years ago: Vice President Joe Biden, addressing the Human Rights Campaign dinner in Washington, threw his unequivocal support behind letting transgender people serve openly in the U.S. military; the Obama administration would lift a longstanding ban in June 2016. In 2019, the Supreme Court upheld a Trump administration policy under which people who have undergone gender transition are barred from enlisting.
One year ago: Attorneys announced that MGM Resorts International had agreed to pay up to $800 million to families of the 58 people who died and to the hundreds who were injured when a shooter rained gunfire on country music fans from a high-rise Las Vegas Strip hotel in 2017.