TODAY IN HISTORY

1807: Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine.

1922: The Supreme Court, in Leser v. Garnett, unanimously upheld the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which guaranteed the right of women to vote.

1933: Germany’s parliament building, the Reichstag, was gutted by fire; Chancellor Adolf Hitler, blaming the Communists, used the fire to justify suspending civil liberties.

1939: The Supreme Court, in National Labor Relations Board v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corp., effectively outlawed sit-down strikes.

1942: The Battle of the Java Sea began during World War II; Imperial Japanese naval forces scored a decisive victory over the Allies.

1951: The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, limiting a president to two terms of office, was ratified.

1973: Members of the American Indian Movement occupied the hamlet of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, the site of the 1890 massacre of Sioux men, women and children. (The occupation lasted until the following May.)

1991: Operation Desert Storm came to a conclusion as President George H.W. Bush declared that “Kuwait is liberated, Iraq’s army is defeated,” and announced that the allies would suspend combat operations at midnight Eastern time.

1997: Divorce became legal in Ireland.

1998: With the approval of Queen Elizabeth II, Britain’s House of Lords agreed to end 1,000 years of male preference by giving a monarch’s first-born daughter the same claim to the throne as any first-born son.

2006: Former Newark Eagles co-owner Effa Manley became the first woman elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

2010: In Chile, a magnitude 8.8 earthquake and tsunami killed 524 people, caused $30 billion in damage and left more than 200,000 homeless.

2020: U.S. stocks posted their worst one-day drop since 2011, as worldwide markets plummeted amid growing anxiety about the coronavirus; the Dow tumbled nearly 1,200 points. President Donald Trump declared that a widespread U.S. outbreak of the virus was not inevitable, even as top health authorities at his side warned that more infections were coming.