TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1944

During World War II, Paris was liberated by Allied forces after four years of Nazi occupation.

1718

Hundreds of French colonists arrived in Louisiana, with some settling in present-day New Orleans.

1916

President Woodrow Wilson signed an act establishing the National Park Service within the Department of the Interior.

1958

President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a measure providing pensions for former U.S. presidents and their widows.

1967

George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party, was shot to death in the parking lot of a shopping center in Arlington, Virginia; former party member John Patler was later convicted of the killing.

1980

The Broadway musical “42nd Street” opened.

1981

The U.S. spacecraft Voyager 2 came within 63,000 miles of Saturn’s cloud cover, sending back pictures of and data about the ringed planet.

2001

Rhythm-and-blues singer Aaliyah was killed with eight others in a plane crash in the Bahamas; she was 22.

2012

Neil Armstrong, 82, who commanded the historic Apollo 11 lunar landing and was the first man to set foot on the moon in July 1969, died in Cincinnati, Ohio.

2009

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the liberal lion of the U.S. Senate, died at age 77 in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, after a battle with a brain tumor.

2014

A funeral was held in St. Louis for Michael Brown, the Black 18-year-old who was shot to death by a police officer in suburban Ferguson.

2018

Sen. John Mccain of Arizona, who had spent years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam before a 35-year political career that took him to the Republican presidential nomination, died at the age of 81 after battling brain cancer for more than a year.

TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS

Actor Sean Connery is 90. Actor Tom Skerritt is 87. Rock singer-actor Gene Simmons is 71. Rock singer Rob Halford is 69. Rock singer Elvis Costello is 66. Country singer Billy Ray Cyrus is 59. Actor Blair Underwood is 56.