TODAY IN HISTORY

Today is Tuesday, Nov. 10, the 315th day of 2020. There are 51 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

On Nov. 10, 1775, the U.S. Marines were organized under authority of the Continental Congress.

On this date:

In 1766, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, had its beginnings as William Franklin, the Royal Governor of New Jersey, signed a charter establishing Queen’s College in New Brunswick.

In 1919, the American Legion opened its first national convention in Minneapolis.

In 1928, Hirohito ( hee-rohhee-toh) was enthroned as Emperor of Japan.

In 1938, Kate Smith first sang Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” on her CBS radio program.

In 1944, during World War II, the ammunition ship USS Mount Hood (AE-11) exploded while moored at the Manus Naval Base in the Admiralty Islands in the South Pacific, leaving 45 confirmed dead and 327 missing and presumed dead.

In 1951, customer- dialed long- distance telephone service began as Mayor M. Leslie Denning of Englewood, New Jersey, called Alameda, California, Mayor Frank Osborne without operator assistance.

In 1975, the U.N. General Assembly approved a resolution equating Zionism with racism (the world body repealed the resolution in Dec. 1991). The ore-hauling ship SS Edmund Fitzgerald mysteriously sank during a storm in Lake Superior with the loss of all 29 crewmembers.

In 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.

In 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 (EE’-puhn).

In 2009, John Allen Muhammad, mastermind of the 2002 sniper attacks that killed 10 in 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.”