TODAY IN HISTORY
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.