TODAY IN HISTORY

1533: England’s King Henry VIII secretly married his second wife, Anne Boleyn, who later gave birth to Elizabeth I.

1759: Scottish poet Robert Burns was born in Alloway.

1915: America’s first official transcontinental telephone call took place as Alexander Graham Bell, who was in New York, spoke to his former assistant, Thomas Watson, who was in San Francisco, over a line set up by American Telephone & Telegraph.

1924: The first Winter Olympic Games opened in Chamonix, France.

1945: The World War II Battle of the Bulge ended as German forces were pushed back to their original positions. Grand Rapids, Michigan, became the first community to add fluoride to its public water supply.

1947: Gangster Al Capone died in Miami Beach, Florida, at age 48.

1949: The first Emmy Awards, honoring local Los Angeles TV programs and talent, were presented at the Hollywood Athletic Club.

1971: Idi Amin seized power in Uganda by ousting President Milton Obote in a military coup.

1981: The 52 Americans held hostage by Iran for 444 days arrived in the United States.

2004: NASA’s Opportunity rover zipped its first pictures of Mars to Earth, showing a surface smooth and dark red in some places, and strewn with fragmented slabs of light bedrock in others.

2017: President Donald Trump moved aggressively to tighten the nation’s immigration controls, signing executive actions to jumpstart construction of his promised U.S.-Mexico border wall and cut federal grants for immigrant-protecting “sanctuary cities.” Death claimed actor Mary Tyler Moore at age 80 and actor John Hurt at age 77.

2019: President Donald Trump’s confidant Roger Stone was arrested by the FBI in a pre-dawn raid at his Florida home and charged with lying about his pursuit of Russian-hacked emails damaging to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election bid. (Stone was convicted in November 2019 on charges including lying to Congress and witness tampering; Trump commuted his 40-month prison sentence just days before Stone was due to report to prison in July 2020 and issued Stone a pardon in December of that year.)