TODAY IN HISTORY

1630: Englishman John Winthrop, leading a fleet carrying Puritan refugees, arrived at the Massachusetts Bay Colony, where he became its governor.

1776: Virginia’s colonial legislature adopted a Declaration of Rights.

1942: Anne Frank, a German-born Jewish girl living in Amsterdam, received a diary for her 13th birthday, less than a month before she and her family went into hiding from the Nazis.

1963: Civil rights leader Medgar Evers, 37, was shot and killed outside his home in Jackson, Miss. (In 1994, Byron De La Beckwith was convicted of murdering Evers and sentenced to life in prison; he died in 2001.)

1964: South African Black nationalist Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life in prison along with seven other people, including Walter Sisulu, for committing sabotage against the apartheid regime (all were eventually released, Mandela in 1990).

1967: The U.S. Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, unanimously struck down state laws prohibiting interracial marriages.

1978: David Berkowitz was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison for each of the six “Son of Sam” .44-caliber killings that terrified New Yorkers. 1987: President Ronald Reagan, during a visit to the divided German city of Berlin, exhorted Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.”

1991: Russians went to the polls to elect Boris N.

Yeltsin president of their republic.

1994: Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were slashed to death outside her Los Angeles home. (O.J. Simpson was later acquitted of the killings in a criminal trial but was eventually held liable in a civil action.)

2004: Former President Ronald Reagan’s body was sealed inside a tomb at his presidential library in Simi Valley, California, following a week of mourning and remembrance by world leaders and regular Americans.

2012: Democrat Ron Barber, who almost lost his life in the Arizona shooting rampage that seriously wounded former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, won a special election to succeed her. Former mobster Henry Hill, the subject of the movie “Goodfellas,” died in Los Angeles a day after his 69th birthday.