Today in history
On Aug. 10, 1821, Missouri became the 24th state.
In 1846 Congress chartered the Smithsonian Institution, named after English scientist James Smithson, whose bequest of $500,000 had made it possible.
In 1885 in Baltimore, Leo Daft opened the nation’s first commercially operated electric streetcar.
In 1921 Franklin Roosevelt, 39, was stricken with polio at his summer home in New Brunswick, Canada.
In 1944 American forces put down Japanese resistance on the Pacific island of Guam.
In 1945 Japan offered to surrender in World War II after American atomic bombs devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In 1949 the National Military Establishment was renamed the Department of Defense.
In 1969 Leno and Rosemary LaBianca were killed in their Los Angeles home by members of Charles Manson’s cult, one day after actress Sharon Tate and four other people were killed by the same assailants.
In 1977 postal employee David Berkowitz was arrested in Yonkers, N.Y., and charged in the “Son of Sam” serial killings that left six people dead and seven wounded.
In 1988 President Ronald Reagan signed a measure providing $20,000 payments to Japanese-Americans who had been interned during World War II.
In 1993 Ruth Bader Ginsburg was sworn in as the second female justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 1995 Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were charged with 11 counts in the Oklahoma City bombing (McVeigh was convicted of murder and executed; Nichols was convicted of conspiracy and involuntary manslaughter). Also in 1995 Norma McCorvey, “Jane Roe” of the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, announced she had joined the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue.
In 2003 Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko, aboard the International Space Station, married his earthbound bride, Ekaterina Dmitriev, in the first wedding ever conducted from space.
In 2006 British authorities announced they had thwarted a terrorist plot to simultaneously blow up 10 aircraft heading to the U.S. using explosives smuggled in hand luggage. Also in 2006, a suicide bomber blew himself up among pilgrims outside Iraq’s holiest Shiite shrine in Najaf, killing 35 people.
In 2012 Brig. Gen. Tammy Smith became the nation’s first openly gay general, during a ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.
In 2013 an FBI agent killed kidnapping suspect James Lee DiMaggio as authorities freed Hannah Anderson, 16, in Idaho. Officials suspect that DiMaggio set his house on fire a week earlier in Boulevard, Calif., killing Hannah’s 8-year-old brother, Ethan, and their mother, Christina Anderson, 44.