TODAY IN HISTORY

In 1775, the United States Navy had its origins as the Continental Congress ordered the construction of a naval fleet.

In 1843, the Jewish organization B’nai B’rith was founded in New York City.

In 1932, President Herbert Hoover and Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes laid the cornerstone for the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington.

In 1957, CBS broadcast “The Edsel Show,” a onehour live special starring Bing Crosby designed to promote the new, ill-fated Ford automobile. (It was the first special to use new videotape technology to delay the broadcast to the West Coast.)

In 1962, Edward Albee’s four-character drama “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” opened on Broadway.

In 1972, a Uruguayan chartered flight carrying 45 people crashed in the Andes; survivors resorted to feeding off the remains of some of the dead in order to stay alive until they were rescued more than two months later.

In 1999, the Senate rejected the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, with 48 senators voting in favor and 51 against, far short of the 67 needed for ratification.

In 2010, rescuers in Chile using a missilelike escape capsule pulled 33 men one by one to fresh air and freedom 69 days after they were trapped in a collapsed mine a half-mile underground.

In 2016, Donald Trump heatedly rejected the growing list of sexual-assault allegations against him as “pure fiction,” hammering his female accusers as “horrible, horrible liars.”