The Bakersfield Californian

TODAY IN HISTORY

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1377: King Edward III died after ruling England for 50 years; he was succeeded by his grandson, Richard II.

1788: The United States Constituti­on went into effect as New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify it.

1834: Cyrus Hall McCormick received a patent for his reaping machine.

1942: An Imperial Japanese submarine fired shells at Fort Stevens on the Oregon coast, causing little damage.

1954: The American Cancer Society presented a study to the American Medical Associatio­n meeting in San Francisco which found that men who regularly smoked cigarettes died at a considerab­ly higher rate than non-smokers.

1964: Civil rights workers Michael H. Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James E. Chaney were slain in Philadelph­ia, Miss.; their bodies were found buried in an earthen dam six weeks later. (Forty-one years later on this date in 2005, Edgar Ray Killen, an 80-year-old former Ku Klux Klansman, was found guilty of manslaught­er; he was sentenced to 60 years in prison, where he died in January 2018.)

1973: The U.S. Supreme Court, in Miller v. California, ruled that states may ban materials found to be obscene according to local standards.

1977: Menachem Begin of the Likud bloc became Israel’s sixth prime minister.

1982: A jury in Washington, D.C., found John Hinckley Jr. not guilty by reason of insanity in the shootings of President Ronald Reagan and three other men.

1989: A sharply divided Supreme Court ruled that burning the American flag as a form of political protest was protected by the First Amendment. 1997: The WNBA made its debut as the New York

Liberty defeated host Los Angeles Sparks 67-57. 2010: Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistan-born U.S. citizen, pleaded guilty to charges of plotting a failed car bombing in New York’s Times Square. (Shahzad was later sentenced to life in prison.)

2011: The Food and Drug Administra­tion announced that cigarette packs in the U.S. would have to carry macabre images that included rotting teeth and gums, diseased lungs and a sewn-up corpse of a smoker as part of a graphic campaign aimed at discouragi­ng Americans from lighting up.

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