TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT 1929

“Black Tuesday” descended upon the New York Stock Exchange. Prices collapsed amid panic selling and thousands of investors were wiped out as America’s “Great Depression” began.

ALSO ON THIS DATE 1901

President William McKinley’s assassin, Leon Czolgosz, was electrocuted.

1940

A blindfolded Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson drew the first number — 158— from a glass bowl in America’s first peacetime military draft.

1956

During the Suez Canal crisis, Israel invaded Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. “The HuntleyBrinkley Report” premiered as NBC’s nightly television newscast.

1960

A chartered plane carrying the California Polytechnic State University football team crashed on takeoff from Toledo, Ohio, killing 22of the 48people on board.

1967

Expo 67in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, closed after six months.

1987

Following the confirmation defeat of Robert H. Bork to serve on the U.S. . Supreme Court, President W Ronald Reagan announced his choice of Douglas H. Ginsburg, a nomination that fell apart over revelations of Ginsburg’s . previous marijuana use. Jazz great Woody Herman died in Los Angeles at age 74.

1994

Gunman Francisco Martin Duran fired more than two dozen shots from a semiautomatic rifle at the White House.

1998

Sen. John Glenn, at age 77, roared back into space aboard the shuttle Discovery, retracing the trail he’d blazed for America’s astronauts 36 years earlier.