Today in History
Today’s highlight:
On September 1, 1945, Americans received word of Japan’s formal surrender that ended World War II. Because of the time difference, it was Sept. 2 in Tokyo Bay, where the ceremony took place.
On this date:
1894: The Great Hinckley Fire destroyed Hinckley, Minnesota, and five other communities, killing more than 400 people.
1923: The Japanese cities of Tokyo and Yokohama were devastated by an earthquake that claimed some 140,000 lives.
1939: World War II began as Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
1941: The first municipally owned parking building in the United States opened in Welch, W. Va.
1942: U.S. District Court Judge Martin I. Welsh, ruling from Sacramento, Calif., on a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Fred Korematsu, upheld the wartime detention of Japanese-Americans as well as Japanese nationals.
1969: A coup in Libya brought Moammar Gadhafi to power.
1972: American Bobby Fischer won the international chess crown in Reykjavik, Iceland, as Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union resigned before the resumption of Game 21. An arson fire at the Blue Bird Cafe in Montreal, Canada, claimed 37 lives.
1983: 269 people were killed when a Korean Air Lines Boeing 747 was shot down by a Soviet jet fighter after the airliner entered Soviet airspace.
1985: A U.s.-french expedition located the wreckage of the Titanic on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean roughly 400 miles off Newfoundland.
2005: New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin issued a “desperate SOS” as his city descended into anarchy amid the flooding left by Hurricane Katrina.
2009: Vermont’s law allowing same-sex marriage went into effect.
2018: At a nearly three-hour memorial service for the late Arizona Republican Sen. John Mccain in Washington, Mccain’s daughter and two former presidents led a public rebuke of President Donald Trump’s divisive politics and called for a return to civility among the nation’s leaders.
Ten years ago: President Barack Obama convened a new round of ambitious Mideast peace talks at the White House as he hosted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the first faceto-face negotiations in nearly two years. A man upset with the Discovery Channel’s programming took two employees and a security officer hostage at the network’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland; police shot and killed the gunman, James Jae Lee, and all three hostages escaped safely.
Five years ago: President Barack Obama stared down a melting glacier in Alaska in a dramatic use of his presidential pulpit to sound the alarm on climate change. Invoking
“God’s authority,” Rowan County, Kentucky, Clerk Kim Davis denied marriage licenses to gay couples again in direct defiance of the federal courts, and vowed not to resign, even under the pressure of steep fines or jail.
One year ago: Hurricane Dorian struck the northern Bahamas as a catastrophic Category 5 storm with record 185 mph winds that ripped off roofs and overturned cars. South Carolina’s governor ordered a mandatory evacuation of the entire coast of the state amid the threat from Dorian.