TODAY IN HISTORY
Today is Tuesday, Aug. 9.
Today’s highlight:
On Aug. 9, 1974, Vice President Gerald R. Ford became the nation’s 38th chief executive as President Richard Nixon’s resignation took effect.
On this date:
In 1854, Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden,” which described Thoreau’s expe- riences while living near Walden Pond in Massachusetts, was first published.
In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order nationalizing silver.
In 1936, Jesse Owens won his fourth gold medal at the Berlin Olympics as the United States took first place in the 400-meter relay.
In 1944, 258 African-Amer- ican sailors based at Port Chicago, California, refused to load a munitions ship following a cargo vessel explosion that killed 320 men, many of them Black. (Fifty of the sailors were convicted of mutiny, fined and impris- oned.)
In 1945, three days after the atomic bombing of Hiro- shima, Japan, a U.S. B-29 Superfortress code-named Bockscar dropped a nuclear device (“Fat Man”) over Naga- saki, killing an estimated 74,000 people.
In 1969, actor Sharon Tate and four other people were found brutally slain at Tate’s Los Angeles home; cult leader Charles Manson and a group of his followers were later convicted of the crime.
In 1982, a federal judge in Washington ordered John W. Hinckley Jr., who’d been acquitted of shooting Pres- ident Ronald Reagan and three others by reason of insanity, committed to a mental hospital.
In 1988, President Ronald Reagan nominated Lauro Cavazos to be secretary of education; Cavazos became the first Hispanic to serve in the Cabinet.
In 1995, Jerry Garcia, lead singer of the Grateful Dead, died in Forest Knolls, California, of a heart attack at age 53.
In 2004, Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols, addressing a court for the first time, asked victims of the blast for forgiveness as a judge sentenced him to 161 consecutive life sentences.
In 2014, Michael Brown Jr., a Black 18-year-old, was shot to death by a police officer following an altercation in Ferguson, Missouri; Brown’s death led to sometimes-violent protests in Ferguson and other U.S. cities, spawning a national “Black Lives Matter” movement.
Ten years ago: The United States began a landmark project to clean up dioxin left from Agent Orange at the site of a former U.S. air base in Danang in central Vietnam, 50 years after the defoliant was first sprayed by American planes on Vietnam’s jungles to destroy enemy cover.
Five years ago: Prosecutors in Florida said golfer Tiger Woods had agreed to plead guilty to reckless driving and would enter a diversion program that would allow him to have his record w iped c le a n; he’d been charged with DUI in May when he was found asleep in his car, apparently under the influence of a prescription painkiller and sleeping medication.
One year ago: Testifying at his Los Angeles murder trial, Robert Durst denied killing his best friend, Susan Berman, at her home in 2000. (Durst would be convicted of first-degree murder; the real estate heir died in January 2022 at age 78 while serving a life sentence.)