On this date

In 1776, the Revolutionary War Siege of Boston ended as British forces evacuated the city.

In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt first likened crusading journalists to a man with “the muckrake in his hand” in a speech to the Gridiron Club in Washington.

In 1912, the Camp Fire Girls organization was incorporated in Washington, D.C., two years to the day after it was founded in Thetford, Vt. (The group is now known as Camp Fire.) In 1941, the National Gallery of Art opened in Washington, D.C. In 1966, a U.S. Navy midget submarine located a missing hydrogen bomb that had fallen from a U.S. Air Force B-52 bomber into the Mediterranean Sea off Spain. (It took several more weeks to actually recover the bomb.)

In 1970, the United States cast its first veto in the U.N. Security Council, killing a resolution that would have condemned Britain for failing to use force to overthrow the white-ruled government of Rhodesia.

In 1992, whites in South Africa voted by a greater than 2-1 majority to forge ahead with talks to end white rule and give blacks voting rights for the first time in the country’s history.

Ten years ago: John Backus, the developer of Fortran, a programming language that changed how people interacted with computers, died in Ashland, Ore., at age 82.

Five years ago: John Demjanjuk, 91, convicted of being a lowranking guard at the Sobibor death camp, but who maintained his innocence, died in Bad Feilnbach, Germany.

One year ago: Finally bowing to years of public pressure, SeaWorld Entertainment said it would no longer breed killer whales or make them perform crowd-pleasing tricks.