Today in history

In 1832 Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who wrote “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” under the pen name Lewis Carroll, was born in Cheshire, England.

In 1880 Thomas Edison received a patent for his electric incandescent lamp.

In 1888 the National Geographic Society was incorporated in Washington, D.C.

In 1943 about 50 bombers struck Wilhelmshaven in the first all-American air raid against Germany in World War II.

In 1944 the Soviet Union announced the end of the deadly German siege of Leningrad, which had lasted for more than two years.

In 1945 Soviet troops liberated the Nazi concentration camps Auschwitz and Birkenau in Poland.

In 1951 an era of atomic testing in the Nevada desert began as an Air Force plane dropped a 1-kiloton bomb on Frenchman Flats.

In 1967 astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee died in a flash fire during a test aboard their Apollo 1 spacecraft at Cape Kennedy, Fla.

In 1967 more than 60 nations signed a treaty banning the orbiting of nuclear weapons.

In 1973 the Vietnam peace accords were signed in Paris.

In 1977 the Vatican reaffirmed the Roman Catholic Church’s ban on female priests.

In 1984

singer Michael Jackson suffered serious burns to his scalp when pyrotechnics set his hair on fire during the filming of a Pepsi-Cola TV commercial at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.

In 2002 Wafa Idris, a Palestinian paramedic, became the first female suicide bomber against Israel; her victim was an 81-year-old man.

In 2013 a nightclub fire in the southern Brazilian city of Santa Maria killed 238 people.

In 2017 President Donald Trump signed an executive order suspending refugee arrivals and banning travel to the U.S. from seven Muslim-majority countries, spawning chaos and protests across the globe, trapping unwitting airline passengers in terminals and foreign lands and igniting legal challenges that put the bans on hold.