TODAY IN HISTORY
1789: President-elect George Washington left Mount Vernon, Va., for his inauguration in New York. 1862: During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill ending slavery in the District of Columbia.
1867: Aviation pioneer Wilbur Wright was born in Millville, Ind. (His brother Orville was born five years later in Dayton, Ohio). 1945: A Soviet submarine in the Baltic Sea torpedoed and sank the MV Goya, which Germany was using to transport civilian refugees and wounded soldiers; it’s estimated that up to 7,000 people died. 1947: The cargo ship Grandcamp, carrying ammonium nitrate, blew up in the harbor in Texas City, Texas; a nearby ship, the High Flyer, which was carrying ammonium nitrate and sulfur, caught fire and exploded the following day; the blasts and fires killed nearly 600 people. 1963: Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” in which the civil rights activist responded to a group of local clergymen who had criticized him for leading street protests; King defended his tactics, writing, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” 1972: Apollo 16 blasted off on a voyage to the moon with astronauts John W. Young, Charles M. Duke Jr. and Ken Mattingly on board.
1996: Britain’s Prince Andrew and his wife, Sarah, the Duchess of York, announced they were in the process of divorcing. 2007: In one of America’s worst school attacks, a college senior killed 32 people on the campus of Virginia Tech before taking his own life. 2011: A Taliban sleeper agent walked into a meeting of NATO trainers and Afghan troops at Forward Operating Base Gamberi in the eastern Afghan province of Laghman and detonated a vest of explosives hidden underneath his uniform; six American troops, four Afghan soldiers and an interpreter were killed.
2020: The Labor Department said the wave of layoffs that had engulfed the economy since the coronavirus struck had caused another 5.2 million people to seek unemployment benefits, raising the total number of laid-off workers to 22 million.