TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT 2003

American-led forces in Iraq dropped thousand-pound bombs on Republican Guard units guarding the gates to Baghdad and battled for control of the strategic city of Nasiriyah. President George W. Bush warned of “further sacrifice” ahead in the face of unexpectedly fierce fighting.

ALSO ON THIS DATE 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.

1930

The names of the Turkish cities of Constantinople and Angora were changed to Istanbul and Ankara.

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 Nazioccupied French port of St. Nazaire in Operation Chariot, destroying the only dry dock on the Atlantic coast capable of repairing the German battleship Tirpitz.

1963

The Alfred Hitchcock film “The Birds” premiered in New York.

1969

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

1978

In Stump v. Sparkman, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld, 5-3, the judicial immunity of an Indiana judge against a lawsuit brought by a young woman who’d been ordered sterilized by the judge when she was a teenager.

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, Pennsylvania.