TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

August 9, 1974

Vice President Gerald R. Ford became the nation’s 38th chief executive as President Richard Nixon’s resignation took effect.

ALSO ON THIS DATE 1854

Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden,” which described Thoreau’s experiences while living near Walden Pond in Massachusetts, was first published..

1936

Jesse Owens won his fourth gold medal at the Berlin Olympics as the United States took first place in the 400-meter relay.

1944

258 African-American sailors based at Port Chicago, California, refused to load a munitions ship following a cargo vessel explosion that killed 320 men, many of them black.

1945

Three days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, a U.S. B-29 Superfortress code-named Bockscar dropped a nuclear device over Nagasaki, killing an estimated 74,000 people.

1969

Actress Sharon Tate and four other people were found brutally slain at Tate’s Los Angeles home; cult leader Charles Manson and a group of his followers were later convicted of the crime.

1982

A federal judge in Washington ordered John W. Hinckley Jr., who’d been acquitted of shooting President Ronald Reagan and three others by reason of insanity, committed to a mental hospital.