TODAY IN HISTORY

1815: Napoleon Bonaparte escaped from exile on the Island of Elba and headed back to France in a bid to regain power.

1904: The United States and Panama proclaimed a treaty under which the U.S. agreed to undertake efforts to build a ship canal across the Panama isthmus.

1942: “How Green Was My Valley” won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1941, beating out nine other films, including “The Maltese Falcon” and “Citizen Kane.”

1945: Authorities ordered a midnight curfew at nightclubs, bars and other places of entertainment across the nation.

1952: Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced

that Britain had developed its own atomic bomb. 1966: South Korean troops sent to fight in the Vietnam War massacred at least 380 civilians in Go Dai hamlet.

1987: The Tower Commission, which had probed the Iran-Contra affair, issued its report, which rebuked President Ronald Reagan for failing to control his national security staff.

1993: A truck bomb built by Islamic extremists exploded in the parking garage of the North Tower of New York’s World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000 others. (The bomb failed to topple the North Tower into the South Tower, as the terrorists had hoped; both structures were destroyed in the 9/11 attack eight years later.)

2005: Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak ordered his country’s constitution changed to allow presidential challengers in an upcoming fall election. 2012: Trayvon Martin, 17, was shot to death in Sanford, Fla., during an altercation with neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman, who said he acted in self-defense. (Zimmerman was later acquitted of second-degree murder.) 2014: Republican Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed a bill pushed by social conservatives that would have allowed people with sincerely held religious beliefs to refuse to serve gays.

2016: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie stunned the Republican establishment by endorsing Donald Trump for president.

2020: The World Health Organization reported that the number of new coronavirus cases outside China had exceeded the number of new infections in China for the first time.