Today in history
On Oct. 11, 1991, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Anita Hill accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexually harassing her; Thomas re- appeared before the panel to denounce the proceedings as a “high-tech lynching.”
In 1779, Polish nobleman Casimir Pulaski, fighting for American independence, died two days after being wounded during the Revolutionary War Battle of Savannah, Georgia.
In 1809, just over three years after the famous Lewis and Clark expedition ended, Meriwether Lewis was found dead in a Tennessee inn, an apparent suicide; he was 35.
In 1905, the Juilliard School was founded as the Institute of Musical Art in New York.
In 1906, the San Francisco Board of Education ordered the city’s Asian students segregated in a purely “Oriental” school. ( The order was later rescinded at the behest of President Theodore Roosevelt, who promised to curb future Japanese immigration to the United States.)
In 1910, Theodore Roosevelt became the first former U. S. president to fly in an airplane during a visit to St. Louis.
In 1968, Apollo 7, the first manned Apollo mission, was launched with astronauts Wally Schirra (shih-RAH’), Donn Fulton Eisele and R. Walter Cunningham aboard. The government of Panama was overthrown in a military coup.
In 1983, the last full-fledged hand-cranked telephone system in the United States went out of service as 440 telephone customers in Bryant Pond, Maine, were switched over to direct-dial service.
In 1986, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev opened two days of talks in Reykjavik, Iceland, concerning arms control and human rights.
In 2001, in his first primetime news conference since taking office, President George W. Bush said “it may take a year or two” to track down Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network in Afghanistan, but he asserted that after a five-day aerial bombardment, “we’ve got them on the run.”
In 2002, former President Jimmy Carter was named the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
In 2014, customs and health officials began taking the temperatures of passengers arriving at New York’s Kennedy International Airport from three West African countries in a stepped- up screening effort meant to prevent the spread of the Ebola virus.
Ten years ago: Rescuers in Chile finished reinforcing a hole drilled to bring 33 trapped miners to safety and sent a rescue capsule nearly all the way to where the men were trapped, proving the escape route worked.
Five years ago: In an interview that aired on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” President Barack Obama said that Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct government business when she served as secretary of state was a mistake but didn’t endanger national security.
One year ago: Testifying in defiance of a White House ban, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch told House impeachment investigators that President Donald Trump had pressured the State Department to oust her from her post and get her out of the country; she’d been recalled from Ukraine as Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani pressed Ukrainian officials to investigate corruption allegations against the Bidens. Fox news anchor Shepard Smith, who had angered many of the network’s conservative viewers by frequently giving tough reports debunking statements made by Trump and his supporters, abruptly quit after signing off his final newscast.