TODAY INHISTORY

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT 1775

The U. S. Marines were organized under authority of the Continental Congress.

1766

Rutgers, the State University of Newjersey, had its beginnings as William Franklin, the Royal Governor of New Jersey, signed a charter establishing Queen’s College in Newbrunswick.

1919

The American Legion opened its first national convention in Minneapolis.

1928

Hirohito was enthroned as Emperor of Japan.

1944

During World War II, the ammunition ship USS Mount Hood exploded while moored at the Manus Naval Base in the Admiralty Islands in the South Pacific, leaving 45confirmed dead and 327 missing and presumed dead.

1951

Customer- dialed longdistance telephone service began as Mayor M. Leslie Denning of Englewood, New Jersey, called Alameda, California, Mayor Frank Osborne without operator assistance.

1975

The U. N. General Assembly approved a resolution equating Zionism with racism. The ore- hauling ship SS Edmund Fitzgerald mysteriously sank during a storm in Lake Superior with the loss of all 29crew members.

1982

The newly finished Vietnam Veterans Memorial was opened to its first visitors in Washington, D. C., three days before its dedication. Soviet leader Leonid I. Brezhnev died at age 75.

1997

A judge in Cambridge, Massachusetts, reduced Louise Woodward’s murder conviction to involuntary manslaughter and sentenced the English au pair to the 279 days she’d already served in the death of 8- month- old Matthew Eappen.

2009

John Allen Muhammad, mastermind of the 2002 sniper attacks that killed 10in the Washington, D. C. region, was executed. President Barack Obama visited Fort Hood, Texas, where he somberly saluted the 13 Americans killed in a shooting rampage, and pledged that the killer would be “met with justice — in this world, and the next.”