Today in History

Today’s highlight:

On Jan. 31, 1958, the United States entered the Space Age with its first successful launch of a satellite, Explorer 1, from Cape Canaveral.

On this date:

1863: During the Civil War, the First South Carolina Volunteers, an all-black Union regiment composed of many escaped slaves, was mustered into federal service at Beaufort,

South Carolina.

1865: The U.S. House of Representatives joined the Senate in passing the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution abolishing slavery, sending it to states for ratification. The amendment was adopted in December 1865. Gen. Robert E. Lee was named general-in-chief of the Confederate States Army by President Jefferson Davis.

1919: Baseball Hall-of-famer Jackie Robinson was born in Cairo, Georgia.

1929: Revolutionary Leon Trotsky and his family were expelled from the Soviet Union.

1945: Pvt. Eddie Slovik, 24, became the first U.S. soldier since the Civil War to be executed for desertion as he was shot by an American firing squad in France.

1950: President Harry S. Truman announced he had ordered development of the hydrogen bomb.

1971: Astronauts Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell and Stuart Roosa blasted off aboard Apollo 14 on a mission to the moon.

1990: Mcdonald’s Corp. opened its first restaurant in Moscow.

2001: A Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands convicted one Libyan, acquitted a second, in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

2007: Some three dozen blinking electronic devices planted around Boston threw a scare into the city in what turned out to be a marketing campaign for the Cartoon Network TV show “Aqua Teen Hunger Force.”

One year ago: A day after he lashed out at U.S. intelligence agency chiefs over their assessments of global threats, President Donald Trump reversed course and said that he and the intelligence community were “all on the same page.”