TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

2018

A gunman identified as a former student opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School near Fort Lauderdale, Florida, killing 17people in the nation’s deadliest school shooting since the attack in Newtown, Connecticut, more than five years earlier.

ALSO ON THIS DATE

1778

The American ship Ranger carried the recently adopted Stars and Stripes to a foreign port for the first time as it arrived in France.

1876

Inventors Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray applied separately for patents related to the telephone.

1912

Arizona became the 48th state of the Union as President William Howard Taft signed a proclamation.

1920

The League of Women Voters was founded in Chicago; its first president was Maud Wood Park.

1929

The “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” took place in a Chicago garage as seven rivals of Al Capone’s gang were gunned down.

1945

During World War II, British and Canadian forces reached the Rhine River in Germany.

1967

Aretha Franklin recorded her cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect” at Atlantic Records in New York.

1979

Adolph Dubs, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, was kidnapped in Kabul by Muslim extremists and killed in a shootout between his abductors and police.

1984

6-year-old Stormie Jones became the world’s first heart-liver transplant recipient when the surgery was performed at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh (she lived until November, 1990).