TODAY IN HISTORY
ONOCT. 11 ...
In 1776, the first naval battle of Lake Champlain was fought during the American Revolution. Gen. Benedict Arnold commanded American forces, which suffered heavy losses but stalled the English.
In 1811 the first steam ferry was put into operation between New York City and Hoboken, N.J., by inventor John Stevens.
In 1868 Thomas A. Edison filed papers for his first invention, an electrical voice recorder to speed the tabulation of votes in Congress. (Congress would reject it.)
In 1884 Eleanor Roosevelt was born in New York City. (She later became the nation’s first lady as the wife of distant cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt.)
In 1890 the Daughters of the American Revolution was founded in Washington.
In 1899, at age 24, Winston Churchill, Britain’s future prime minister, sailed to South Africa to cover the Boer War as chief correspondent for the London Morning Post.
In 1932 the Democratic National Committee sponsored a television program from New York. It was the nation’s first political telecast.
In 1942 the World War II Battle of Cape Esperance began in the Solomon Islands. (It would end in an American victory.)
In 1958 the lunar probe Pioneer 1 was launched. Failing to travel as far as planned, it fell back toward the Earth and burned up in the atmosphere.
In 1962 Pope John XXIII convened the first session of the Roman Catholic Church’s 21st Ecumenical Council, known as Vatican II.
In 1967 Bolivian officials said the body of slain Cuban guerrilla leader Che Guevara had been buried in a secret and remote grave. (It was not until the summer of 1997 that the body was found, dug up and ceremoniously reburied in Cuba.)
In 1968 Apollo 7, the first manned mission of the Apollo series, was launched with astronauts Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele and R. Walter Cunningham. Also in 1968 Panama’s National Guard staged a bloodless coup, ousting President Arnulfo Arias.
In 1975 “Saturday Night Live” premiered on NBC with comic George Carlin as guest host.
In 1979 Cuban President Fidel Castro paid his first visit to New York in 19 years. (He would address the United Nations.)
In 1986 President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev opened two days of talks in Reykjavik, Iceland, on issues of arms control and human rights.
In 1987 thousands of gay-rights activists marched through Washington to demand protection from discrimination and urge more federal funding for AIDS research and treatment.
In 1990 Octavio Paz became the first Mexican writer to be honored by the Nobel Awards Committee when it chose him for the Nobel Prize in literature.
In 1991 comedian and actor Redd Foxx died in Los Angeles; he was 68.
In 1994 American troops, sent to Haiti to end three years of military rule there and place democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in office, took over the National Palace in Port-au-Prince.
In 1998 Pope John Paul II decreed the first Jewish-born saint of the modern era: Edith
Stein, a nun who had died in a gas chamber at the Nazis’ Auschwitz death camp.
In 2002 former President Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize.
In 2005 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it had finished pumping out the New Orleans metropolitan area, which was flooded by Hurricane Katrina six weeks earlier and then was swamped again by Hurricane Rita.
In 2014 screening for the Ebola virus started at New York’s JFK International Airport. (Travel precautions started later at Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson, Chicago’s O’Hare, Newark Liberty in New Jersey and Washington Dulles.)