TODAY IN HISTORY

In 1790: President GeorgeWashington signed a measure authorizing the first U.S. Census. In 1864: Rebecca Lee Crumpler became the first black woman to receive an American medical degree, from the New England Female Medical College in Boston. In 1872: President Ulysses S. Grant signed an act creating Yellowstone National Park. In 1914: National Baseball Hall of Fame announcer Harry Caray was born in St. Louis, Mo. In 1919: a group of Korean nationalists declared their country’s independence from Japanese colonial rule. In 1932: Charles A. Lindbergh Jr., the 20-month-old son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh, was kidnapped from the family home near Hopewell, N.J. (Remains identified as those of the child were found the following May.) In 1943: wartime rationing of processed foods under a point system began in the U.S. In 1954: four Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire from the spectators’ gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives, wounding five members of Congress. The United States detonated a dry-fuel hydrogen bomb, codenamed Castle Bravo, at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands; the explosive yield of 15 megatons, much greater than expected, dropping radioactive fallout on occupied islands hundreds of miles away. In 1961: President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order establishing the Peace Corps. In 1964: Paradise Airlines Flight 901A, a Lockheed L-049 Constellation, crashed near Lake Tahoe Airport in California, killing all 85 people on board. In 1974: seven people, including former Nixon White House aides H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman, former Attorney General John Mitchell and former assistant Attorney General Robert Mardian, were indicted on charges of conspiring to obstruct justice in connection with the Watergate break-in. (These four defendants were convicted in January 1975, although Mardian’s conviction was later reversed.)