TODAY IN HISTORY

1797: Nathaniel Briggs of New Hampshire received a patent for a washing machine.

1854: During the Crimean War, Britain and France declared war on Russia.

1898: The U.S. Supreme Court, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, ruled 6-2 that Wong, who was born in the United States to Chinese immigrants, was an American citizen.

1939: The Spanish Civil War neared its end as Madrid fell to the forces of Francisco Franco.

1941: Novelist and critic Virginia Woolf, 59, drowned herself near her home in Lewes, East Sussex, England.

1942: During World War II, British naval forces staged a successful raid on the Nazi-occupied French port of St. Nazaire in Operation Chariot, destroying the only dry dock on the Atlantic coast capable of repairing the German battleship Tirpitz.

1969: The 34th president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, died in Washington, D.C., at age 78.

1977: “Rocky” won best picture at the 49th Academy Awards; Peter Finch was honored posthumously as best actor for “Network” while his co-star, Faye Dunaway, was recognized as best actress.

1979: America’s worst commercial nuclear accident occurred with a partial meltdown inside the Unit 2 reactor at the Three Mile Island plant near Middletown, Pa.

1999: NATO broadened its attacks on Yugoslavia to target Serb military forces in Kosovo in the fifth straight night of airstrikes; thousands of refugees flooded into Albania and Macedonia from Kosovo.

2012: Bluegrass legend and banjo pioneer Earl Scruggs died in Nashville, Tenn., at 88.