TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

September 1, 1939

World War II began as Nazi Germany invaded Poland.

ALSO ON THIS DATE 1715

Following a reign of 72 years, King Louis XIV of France died four days before his 77th birthday.

1807

Former Vice President Aaron Burr was found not guilty of treason.

1923

The Japanese cities of Tokyo and Yokohama were devastated by an earthquake that claimed some 140,000 lives.

1942

U.S. District Court Judge Martin I. Welsh, ruling from Sacramento, Calif., on a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Fred Korematsu, upheld the wartime detention of Japanese-Americans as well as Japanese nationals.

1945

Americans received word of Japan’s formal surrender that ended World War II.

1961

The Soviet Union ended a moratorium on atomic testing with an above-ground nuclear explosion in central Asia. A TWA Lockheed Constellation crashed shortly after takeoff from Chicago’s Midway Airport, killing all 78 people on board.

1972

American Bobby Fischer won the international chess crown in Reykjavik, Iceland, as Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union resigned before the resumption of Game 21. An arson fire at the Blue Bird Cafe in Montreal, Canada, claimed 37 lives.

1983

269 people were killed when a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 was shot down by a Soviet jet fighter after the airliner entered Soviet airspace.

2004

More than 1,000 people were taken hostage by heavily armed Chechen militants at a school in Beslan in southern Russia; more than 330 people, more than half of them children, were killed in the three-day ordeal.