Today in history
On Aug. 28, 1609, English navigator Henry Hudson discovered Delaware Bay.
In 1749 German poet, dramatist and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born in Frankfurt, Germany.
In 1774 Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first American-born saint, was born in New York.
In 1833 England’s Parliament banned slavery in the British empire.
In 1917, 10 suffragists were arrested as they picketed outside the White House.
In 1922 radio station WEAF in New York City aired the first radio commercial, a 10-minute ad for a real estate company. The station charged $100.
In 1925 entertainer Donald O’Connor was born in Chicago.
In 1928 an all-party conference in Lucknow, India, voted for dominion status within the British empire.
In 1955 Emmett Till, an African-American teenager from Chicago, was abducted from his uncle’s home in Money, Miss., by white men after he supposedly had whistled at a white woman. (His body was found three days later.)
In 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech to 200,000 people at a peaceful civil rights rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. In 1968 Vice President Hubert Humphrey was nominated for president on the first ballot at the stormy Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
In 1971 Ziggy, the Brookfield Zoo elephant that once tried to kill its trainer, was allowed outdoors for the first time in 30 years.
In 1973 at least 520 people were killed by an earthquake in central Mexico.
In 1979 Judge Louis Garippo ruled that John Wayne Gacy would face charges in a single trial that he murdered 33 boys and young men in Chicago. (He would be found guilty.)
In 1981 John Hinckley Jr. pleaded not guilty to charges he had tried to assassinate President Ronald Reagan five months earlier. (Hinckley would be acquitted by reason of insanity.)
In 1983 , citing personal reasons, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin announced he would resign. (He did so Sept. 15.)
In 1988, 70 people were killed when three Italian stunt planes collided during an air show at the U.S. air base in Ramstein, West Germany, sending flaming debris into the crowd of spectators.
In 1990 a tornado cut a 16-mile-long swath through Will County, killing 29 people, injuring 354 and causing $160 million damage, mostly in Plainfield, Crest Hill and Joliet. In 1992 the federal government launched two massive relief operations, rushing food and drinking water to hurricane-ravaged Florida while cargo planes landed in Somalia with tons of food for African famine victims.
In 1995, as the Balkans war raged on, a Serbian rocket struck a crowded market in downtown Sarajevo, killing 37 civilians. (NATO and the U.N. responded two days later with history’s most intensive air offensive, sending about 60 warplanes against Serb positions around the Bosnian capital.)
In 1996 President Bill Clinton was nominated for a second term at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago’s United Center. Also in 1996 the troubled 15-year marriage of Britain’s Prince Charles and Princess Diana ended officially with the issuance of a divorce decree.
In 2001 Gateway, the nation’s No. 4 manufacturer of personal computers, said it was laying off 4,700 employees — 25 percent of its global workforce — because of an increasingly bleak market.
In 2005 New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin ordered everyone in the city to evacuate after Hurricane Katrina grew into a monster storm. Also in 2005 Iraqi negotiators finished a new constitution but without the endorsement of Sunni Arabs.