TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT 1944

During World War II, 320 men, two-thirds of them AfricanAmericans, were killed when a pair of ammunition ships exploded at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in California.

ALSO ON THIS DATE 1717

George Frideric Handel’s “Water Music” was first performed by an orchestra during a boating party on the River Thames, with the musicians on one barge, and King George I listening from another.

1862

During the Civil War, Congress approved the Second Confiscation Act, which declared that all slaves taking refuge behind Union lines were to be set free.

1918

Russia’s Czar Nicholas II and his family were executed by the Bolsheviks.

1945

Following Nazi Germany’s surrender, President Harry S. Truman, Soviet leader Josef Stalin and British Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill began meeting at Potsdam in the final Allied summit of World War II.

1962

The United States conducted its last atmospheric nuclear test to date, detonating a 20-kiloton device, codenamed Little Feller I, at the Nevada Test Site.

1975

An Apollo spaceship docked with a Soyuz spacecraft in orbit in the first superpower link-up of its kind.

1981

114 people were killed when a pair of suspended walkways above the lobby of the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel collapsed during a tea dance.

1996

TWA Flight 800, a Europebound Boeing 747, exploded and crashed off Long Island, New York, shortly after departing John F. Kennedy International Airport, killing all 230 people on board.