TODAY IN HISTORY

1558: Elizabeth I acceded to the English throne upon the death of her half-sister, Queen Mary, beginning a 44-year reign.

1800: Congress held its first session in the partially completed U.S. Capitol building.

1869: The Suez Canal opened in Egypt.

1889: The Union Pacific Railroad Co. began direct, daily railroad service between Chicago and Portland, Ore., as well as Chicago and San Francisco. 1969: The first round of Strategic Arms Limitation Talks between the United States and the Soviet Union opened in Helsinki, Finland.

1970: The Soviet Union landed an unmanned, remote-controlled vehicle on the moon, the Lunokhod 1.

1973: President Richard Nixon told Associated Press managing editors in Orlando, Fla.: “People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.”

1979: Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the release of 13 Black and/or female American hostages being held at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

1989: The Walt Disney animated feature “The Little Mermaid” opened in wide release.

1997: 62 people, most of them foreign tourists, were killed when militants opened fire at the Temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor, Egypt; the attackers, who also hacked their victims, were killed by police.

2002: Abba Eban, the statesman who helped persuade the world to approve creation of Israel and dominated Israeli diplomacy for decades, died near Tel Aviv; he was 87.

2003: Arnold Schwarzenegger was sworn in as the 38th governor of California.

2011: Occupy Wall Street protesters clogged streets and tied up traffic around the U.S. to mark two months since the movement’s birth and signal they weren’t ready to quit, despite the breakup of many of their encampments by police. Clayton Kershaw of the Los Angeles Dodgers won the NL Cy Young Award. Demi Moore said she was ending her 6-year marriage to Ashton Kutcher.

2016: President-elect Donald Trump, at Trump Tower in New York, held his first meeting with a world leader, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, and received advice from former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.