TODAY IN HISTORY

1908: Henry Ford introduced his Model T automobile to the market.

1910: The offices of the Los Angeles Times were destroyed by a bomb explosion and fire; 21 Times employees were killed. 1937: Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black delivered a radio address in which he acknowledged being a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, but said he had dropped out of the organization before becoming a U.S. senator.

1949: Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic of China during a ceremony in Beijing. A 42day strike by the United Steelworkers of America began over the issue of retirement benefits. 1957: The motto “In God We Trust” began appearing on U.S. paper currency. 1961: Roger Maris of the New York Yankees hit his 61st home run during a 162-game season, compared to Babe Ruth’s 60 home runs during a 154game season.

1962: Johnny Carson debuted as host of NBC’s “Tonight Show,” beginning a nearly 30-year run. 1982: Sony began selling the first commercial compact disc player, the CDP-101, in Japan.

1987: Eight people were killed when an earthquake measuring magnitude 5.9 struck the Los Angeles area.

1996: A federal grand jury indicted Unabomber suspect Theodore Kaczynski in the 1994 mail bomb slaying of advertising executive Thomas Mosser. (Kaczynski was later sentenced to four life terms plus 30 years.)

2017: A gunman opened fire from a room at the Mandalay Bay casino hotel in Las Vegas on a crowd of 22,000 country music fans at a concert below, leaving 58 people dead and more than 800 injured in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history; the gunman, 64-year-old Stephen Craig Paddock, killed himself before officers arrived.