This day in history
Today is Friday, Dec. 1, the 335th day of 2023. There are 30 days left in the year.
Birthdays: Actor-director Woody Allen is 88. World Golf Hall of Famer Lee Trevino is 84. Singer Dianne Lennon (The Lennon Sisters) is 84. Rock musician John Densmore (The Doors) is 79. Senator Rick Scott, a Repulican from Florida, is 71. Producer-director Andrew Adamson is 57. Actor-comedian Sarah Silverman is 53. Actor Ron Melendez is 51.Actor Charles Michael Davis is 39. Actor Ilfenesh Hadera is 38. R&B singer-actor Janelle Monae is 38. Pop-rock-rap singer Tyler Joseph (Twenty One Pilots) is 35. Actor Zoe Kravitz is 35.
► In 1824, the presidential election was turned over to the US House of Representatives when a deadlock developed among John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, William H. Crawford, and Henry Clay. (Adams ended up the winner.)
► In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln sent his Second Annual Message to Congress, in which he called for the abolition of slavery, and went on to say, “Fellow-citizens, we can not escape history. We of this Congress and this Administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves.”
► ºIn 1941, Japan’s Emperor Hirohito approved waging war against the United States, Britain, and the Netherlands after his government rejected US demands contained in the Hull Note.
► In 1952, the New York Daily News ran a front-page story on Christine Jorgensen’s sex-reassignment surgery with the headline, “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty”.
► In 1955, Rosa Parks, a Black seamstress, was arrested after refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a Montgomery,
Alabama, city bus; the incident sparked a year-long boycott of the buses.
► In 1965, an airlift of refugees from Cuba to the United States began in which thousands of Cubans were allowed to leave their homeland.
► In 1969, the US government held its first draft lottery since World War II.
► In 1974, TWA Flight 514, a Washington-bound Boeing 727, crashed in Virginia after being diverted from National Airport to Dulles International Airport; all 92 people on board were killed. On the same day, Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 6231, a Boeing 727, crashed near Stony Point, New York, with the loss of its three crew members (the plane had been chartered to pick up the Baltimore Colts football team in Buffalo, New York).
► In 1991, Ukrainians voted overwhelmingly for independence from the Soviet Union.
► In 2005, a roadside bomb killed 10 US Marines near Fallujah, Iraq.
► In 2009, President Barack Obama ordered 30,000 more US troops into the war in Afghanistan but promised during a speech to cadets at the US Military Academy at West Point to begin withdrawals in 18 months.
► In 2020, disputing President Donald Trump’s persistent, baseless claims, Attorney General William Barr told the Associated Press that the US Justice Department had uncovered no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could change the outcome of the 2020 election.
► Last year, legislation to avert what could have been an economically ruinous freight rail strike won final approval in Congress as lawmakers responded to President Joe Biden’s call for federal intervention in the longrunning labor dispute.