On this date
In 1869, the 14th president of the United States, Franklin Pierce, died in Concord, New Hampshire.
In 1918, U.S. Army Cpl. Alvin C. York led an attack that killed 25 German soldiers and resulted in the capture of 132 others in the Argonne Forest in France.
In 1934, Bruno Hauptmann was indicted by a grand jury in New Jersey for murder in the death of the kidnapped son of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh.
In 1945, President Harry S. Truman told a press conference in Tiptonville, Tennessee, that the secret scientific knowledge behind the atomic bomb would be shared only with Britain and Canada.
In 1956, Don Larsen pitched the only perfect game in a World Series to date as the New York Yankees beat the Brooklyn Dodgers in Game 5, 2-0.
In 1957, the Brooklyn Baseball Club announced it was accepting an offer to move the Dodgers from New York to Los Angeles.
In 1967, former British Prime Minister Clement Attlee died in London at age 84.
In 1970, Soviet author Alexander Solzhenitsyn was named winner of the Nobel Prize for literature.
In 1982, all labor organizations in Poland, including Solidarity, were banned.
In 1998, the House triggered an open-ended impeachment inquiry against President Bill Clinton in a momentous 258-176 vote; 31 Democrats joined majority Republicans in opening the way for nationally televised impeachment hearings.
In 2001, an SAS airliner taking off from Milan, Italy, hit a private jet, careened into an airport building and exploded; all 110 people on the MD-87, four people in the private jet and four people on the ground were killed.
In 2005, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake flattened villages on the Pakistan-India border, killing an estimated 86,000 people.
Ten years ago: British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced his country would cut in half its remaining troop contingent in Iraq in the spring of 2008. (Britain ended up postponing the withdrawal amid a spike in militia violence.) Michael Devlin was sentenced in Union, Missouri, to life in prison for kidnapping one of two boys he’d held captive in his suburban St. Louis apartment. (Devlin pleaded guilty the next day to dozens of other counts, resulting in a total of 74 life sentences.) Americans Mario R. Capecchi, Oliver Smithies and Briton Martin J. Evans won the 2007 Nobel Prize in medicine. Racing great John Henry, the thoroughbred who earned more than $6.5 million before retiring as a gelding, was euthanized at the Kentucky Horse Park at age 32.
Five years ago: Canadian Joshua Boyle and his U.S.born wife, Caitlan Coleman, were last heard from in Afghanistan before being kidnapped by the Taliban; they remain in captivity. President Barack Obama designated the Keene, California, home of Cesar Chavez, the late founder of the United Farmworkers Union, as a national monument.