TODAY IN HISTORY

On Jan. 17, 1893, Hawaii's monarchy was overthrown as a group of businessmen and sugar planters forced Queen Lili'uokalani to abdicate. The 19th president of the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes, died in Fremont, Ohio, at age 70.

On this date:

In 1781, during the Revolutionary War, American forces defeated the British in the Battle of Cowpens, South Carolina.

In 1806, Thomas Jefferson's daughter, Martha, gave birth to James Madison Randolph, the first child born in the White House.

In 1917, Denmark ceded the Virgin Islands to the United States for $25 million.

In 1929, the cartoon character Popeye the Sailor made his debut in the "Thimble Theatre" comic strip.

In 1945, Soviet and Polish forces liberated Warsaw during World War II; Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, credited with saving tens of thousands of Jews, disappeared in Hungary while in Soviet custody.

In 1953, a prototype of the Chevrolet Corvette was unveiled during the General Motors Motorama at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York.

In 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered his farewell address in which he warned against "the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex."

In 1966, a U.S. Air Force B-52 carrying four unarmed hydrogen bombs crashed on the Spanish coast. (Three of the bombs were quickly recovered, but the fourth wasn't recovered until April.) The Simon & Garfunkel album "Sounds of Silence" was released by Columbia Records.

In 1977, convicted murderer Gary Gilmore, 36, was shot by a firing squad at Utah State Prison in the first U.S. execution in a decade.

In 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., ruled 5-4 that the use of home video cassette recorders to tape television programs for private viewing did not violate federal copyright laws.

In 1995, more than 6,000 people were killed when an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.2 devastated the city of Kobe, Japan.

In 1998, the Drudge Report said Newsweek magazine had killed a story about an affair between President Bill Clinton and an unidentified White House intern, the same day Clinton gave a deposition in Paula Jones' sexual harassment lawsuit against him in which he denied having had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Ten years ago: Former football player-turned-preacher Ernie Holmes, a two-time Super Bowl champion with the Pittsburgh Steelers, was killed in a one-car accident near Lumberton, Texas, at age 59. Character actor Allan Melvin died in Los Angeles at age 84.