TODAY IN HISTORY
1851: Herman Melville’s novel “Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale” was published in the United States, almost a month after being released in Britain.
1862: During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln gave the go-ahead for Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside’s plan to capture the Confederate capital of Richmond, Va.; the resulting Battle of Fredericksburg proved a disaster for the Union.
1881: Charles J. Guiteau went on trial for assassinating President James A. Garfield. (Guiteau was convicted and hanged the following year.)
1915: African American educator Booker T. Washington, 59, died in Tuskegee, Ala.
1940: During World War II, German planes destroyed most of the English town of Coventry.
1965: The U.S. Army’s first major military operation of the Vietnam War began with the start of the five-day Battle of Ia Drang. (The fighting between American troops and North Vietnamese forces ended on Nov. 18 with both sides claiming victory.)
1969: Apollo 12 blasted off for the moon.
1970: A chartered Southern Airways DC-9 crashed while trying to land in West Virginia, killing all 75 people on board, including the Marshall University football team and its coaching staff.
1972: The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above the 1,000 level for the first time, ending the day at 1,003.16.
2005: Alex Rodriguez of the New York Yankees won his second American League Most Valuable Player award in three seasons.
2011: Former Penn State football assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, in a telephone interview with NBC News, denied allegations he’d sexually abused eight boys and said any activities in a campus shower with a boy were just horseplay.
2013: Former Boston crime boss James “Whitey” Bulger was led off to prison to begin serving a life sentence at 84 for his murderous reign in the 1970s and ’80s. (Bulger was killed Oct. 30, 2018, hours after arriving at a federal prison in West Virginia.)
2016: In his first extended remarks on the election, President Barack Obama abandoned his dire warnings and dark predictions about his newly elected successor and urged Americans to give President-elect Donald Trump time to rise to the daunting responsibilities of the office.