ON THIS DATE
In 1870, Joseph H. Rainey of South Carolina became the first Black lawmaker sworn into the U.S. House of Representatives.
In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt nominated Oscar Straus to be Secretary of Commerce and Labor; Straus became the first
Jewish Cabinet member.
In 1913, authorities in Florence, Italy, announced that the “Mona Lisa,” stolen from the Louvre Museum in Paris in 1911, had been recovered.
In 1915, singer-actor Frank Sinatra was born Francis Albert Sinatra in Hoboken, New Jersey.
In 1917, during World War I, a train carrying some 1,000 French troops from the
Italian front derailed while descending a steep hill in Modane; at least half of the soldiers were killed in France’s greatest rail disaster. Father Edward Flanagan founded Boys Town outside Omaha, Nebraska.
In 1939, swashbuckling actor Douglas Fairbanks died in Santa Monica, California, at age 56.
In 1977, the dance movie “Saturday Night Fever,” starring John Travolta, premiered in New York.
In 1985, 248 American soldiers and eight crew members were killed when an Arrow Air charter crashed after takeoff from Gander, Newfoundland.
In 1995, by three votes, the Senate killed a constitutional amendment giving Congress authority to outlaw flag burning and other forms of desecration against Old Glory.
In 1997, Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the international terrorist known as “Carlos the Jackal,” went on trial in Paris on charges of killing two French investigators and a Lebanese national. (Ramirez is serving a life sentence.)
— ASSOCIATED PRESS