TODAY IN HISTORY

On Aug. 21, 1831, Nat Turner launched a violent slave rebellion in Virginia, resulting in the deaths of at least 55 whites; scores of Black people were killed in retribution in the aftermath of the rebellion.

In 1911, Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” was stolen from the Louvre Museum in Paris.

In 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an executive order making Hawaii the 50th state.

In 1993, in a serious setback for NASA, engineers lost contact with the Mars Observer spacecraft as it was about to reach* the red planet on a $980 million mission.

In 2020, a former police officer who became known as the Golden State Killer, Joseph James DeAngelo, told victims and family members in a Sacramento courtroom that he was “truly sorry” before he was sentenced to multiple life prison sentences for a decadelong string of rapes and murders.