TODAY IN HISTORY
1863: President Abraham Lincoln issued his Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction for the South.
1886: The American Federation of Labor was
founded in Columbus, Ohio.
1941: The United States entered World War II as Congress declared war against Imperial Japan, a day after the attack on Pearl Harbor.
1949: The Chinese Nationalist government moved from the Chinese mainland to Formosa as the Communists pressed their attacks.
1972: A United Airlines Boeing 737 crashed while attempting to land at Chicago-Midway Airport, killing 43 of the 61 people on board, as well as two people on the ground; among the dead were Dorothy Hunt, wife of Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt, U.S. Rep. George W. Collins, D-Ill., and CBS News correspondent Michele Clark. 1980: Rock star and former Beatle John Lennon was shot to death outside his New York City apartment building by an apparently deranged fan.
1987: President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev signed a treaty at the White House calling for destruction of intermediate-range nuclear missiles.
1991: AIDS patient Kimberly Bergalis, who had contracted the disease from her dentist, died in Fort Pierce, Fla., at age 23.
1998: Struggling to stave off impeachment, President Bill Clinton’s defenders forcefully pleaded his case before the House Judiciary Committee. The Supreme Court ruled that police cannot search people and their cars after merely ticketing them for routine traffic violations.
2008: In a startling about-face, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told the Guantanamo war crimes tribunal he would confess to masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks; four other men also abandoned their defenses.
2012: Pakistan’s president visited a British hospital where a 15-year-old schoolgirl, Malala Yousafzai, was being treated after being shot in the head by a Taliban gunman in October.
2014: The U.S. and NATO ceremonially ended their combat mission in Afghanistan, 13 years after the Sept. 11 terror attacks sparked their invasion of the country to topple the Taliban-led government.