TODAY IN HISTORY
Today is Saturday, Sept. 1, the 244th day of 2018.
TODAY'S HIGHLIGHT
On September 1, 1945, Americans received word of Japan’s formal surrender that ended World War
II. (Because of the time difference, it was Sept. 2 in Tokyo Bay, where the ceremony took place.)
ON THIS DATE
In 1807, former Vice President Aaron Burr was found not guilty of treason. (Burr was then tried on a misdemeanor charge, but was again acquitted.)
In 1894, the Great Hinckley Fire destroyed Hinckley, Minn., and five other communities, and killed more than 400 people.
In 1923, the Japanese cities of Tokyo and Yokohama were devastated by an earthquake that claimed some 140,000 lives.
In 1939, World War II began as Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
In 1942, U.S. District Court Judge Martin I. Welsh, ruling from Sacramento, Calif., on a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Fred Korematsu, upheld the wartime detention of Japanese-Americans as well as Japanese nationals.
In 1969, a coup in Libya brought Moammar Gadhafi to power.
In 1972, American Bobby Fischer won the international chess crown in Reykjavik (RAY’-kyuh-vik), Iceland, as Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union resigned before the resumption of Game 21. An arson fire at the Blue Bird Cafe in Montreal, Canada, claimed 37 lives.
In 1981, Albert Speer, a close associate of Adolf Hitler who ran the Nazi war machine,
died at a London hospital at age 76.
In 1983, 269 people were killed when a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 was shot down by a Soviet jet fighter after the airliner entered Soviet airspace.
In 1985, a U.S.-French expedition located the wreckage of the Titanic on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean roughly 400 miles off Newfoundland.
In 2004, more than 1,000 people were taken hostage by heavily armed Chechen militants at a school in Beslan in southern Russia; more than 330 people, more than half of them children, were killed in the three-day ordeal.
Ten years ago: Hurricane Gustav slammed into the heart of Louisiana’s fishing and oil industry with 110 mph winds, delivering only a glancing blow to New Orleans.
Five years ago: Syria derided President Barack Obama’s decision to hold off on punitive military strikes, while the Obama administration countered that its case for military action against the regime of President Bashar Assad was getting stronger, saying it had evidence that the nerve agent sarin was used in a deadly August attack. One year ago: A line of cars stretched more than a mile at a water distribution center set up on a high school football field in Beaumont, Texas, which had been left without drinking water by flooding from Hurricane Harvey.