TODAY IN HISTORY
1888: The public was first admitted to the Washington Monument.
1910: A coal dust explosion at the Starkville Mine in Colorado left 56 miners dead.
1914: The Belgian city of Antwerp fell to German forces during World War I.
1936: The first generator at Boulder (later Hoover) Dam began transmitting electricity to Los Angeles.
1974: Businessman Oskar Schindler, credited with saving about 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust, died in Frankfurt, West Germany (at his request, he was buried in Jerusalem).
1985: The hijackers of the Achille Lauro cruise liner surrendered two days after seizing the vessel in the Mediterranean. (Passenger Leon Klinghoffer was killed by the hijackers during the standoff.) 2001: In the first daylight raids since the start of U.S.-led attacks on Afghanistan, jets bombed the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar. Letters postmarked in Trenton, N.J., were sent to Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy; the letters later tested positive for anthrax.
2009: President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for what the Norwegian Nobel Committee called “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
2012: Former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky was sentenced to 30 to 60 years in prison following his conviction on 45 counts of sexual abuse of boys.
2014: Six U.S. military planes arrived in the Ebola hot zone with more Marines as West African leaders pleaded for the world’s help in dealing with what Sierra Leone President Ernest Bai Koroma described as “a tragedy unforeseen in modern times.”
2016: During a bitter debate in St. Louis, Hillary Clinton declared that Donald Trump’s vulgar comments about women revealed “exactly who he is” and proved his unsuitability to be president; firing back, Trump accused Clinton of attacking women involved in Bill Clinton’s extramarital affairs and promised she would “be in jail” if he were president.
2018: Brett Kavanaugh took the bench for the first time as a Supreme Court justice in a jovial atmosphere that was at odds with the rancor that surrounded his confirmation.