Today in history

On Jan. 6, 1540, England’s King Henry VIII married his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves. (The marriage lasted about six months.) In 1759 George Washington and Martha Dandridge Custis were married. In 1838 Samuel Morse first publicly demonstrated his telegraph, in Morristown, N.J. In 1912 New Mexico became the 47th state. In 1919 Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th U.S. president, died in Oyster Bay, N.Y.; he was 60.

In 1942 the Pan American Airways “Pacific Clipper” arrived in New York after making the first round-theworld trip by a commercial airplane.

In 1945 George Herbert Walker Bush married Barbara Pierce in Rye, N.Y.

In 1950 Britain recognized the Communist government of China.

In 1967 U.S. Marines and South Vietnamese troops launched “Operation Deckhouse 5,” an offensive in the Mekong River delta. In 1982 truck driver William Bonin was convicted in Los Angeles of being the “freeway killer” who had murdered 14 young men and boys.

In 1994 figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was clubbed on the right leg by an assailant at Cobo Arena in Detroit. (Four men, including the ex-husband of Kerrigan’s rival, Tonya Harding, later were sentenced to prison for the incident.)

In 1995 over the protests of refugee advocates, the U.S. military began sending Haitians housed at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba home against their will.

In 1999 the 106th Congress convened with Dennis Hastert taking over as House speaker. Also in 1999 Buckingham Palace announced that Prince Edward, the youngest son of Queen Elizabeth II, would marry his longtime girlfriend, public relations executive Sophie RhysJones, later in the year.

In 2000 in Miami, demonstrators angered by the U.S. government’s decision to send Elian Gonzalez back to Cuba skirmished with police.

In 2001 with the vanquished Vice President Al Gore presiding, Congress formally certified George W. Bush the winner of the close and

bitterly contested 2000 presidential election. In 2002 Argentina announced the devaluation of its peso, ending a decadelong policy pegging the currency one-to-one with the U.S. dollar. (In the year that followed, the peso lost 70 percent of its value against the dollar.) In 2004 a design consisting of two reflecting pools and a paved stone field was chosen for the World Trade Center memorial in New York. Also in 2004, hitting star Paul Molitor and reliever Dennis Eckersley were elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame.

In 2005 former Ku Klux Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen was arrested 41 years after three civil rights workers were slain in Mississippi. (Killen later was convicted of manslaughter.) Also in 2005, Andrea Yates’ murder conviction for drowning her children in the bathtub was overturned by a Texas appeals court.

In 2006 Chicago’s Pilgrim Baptist Church, the historic Bronzeville edifice designed by Louis Sullivan and considered the birthplace of gospel music, was nearly destroyed by fire.

In 2008 Mikhail Saakashvili won a second term as Georgia’s president.

In 2012 Juan Rivera, 39, was released from Stateville Correctional Center near Joliet, Ill., after nearly 20 years in prison, exonerated in the 1992 stabbing and sexual assault of 11-year-old Holly Staker in Waukegan, Ill. Rivera had been convicted three times, at three trials, and his exoneration was based on DNA evidence. Also in 2012, Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George apologized for remarks aired on Christmas Day comparing the city’s gay pride parade to 1940s-era Ku Klux Klan protests.

In 2013 the NHL and players union reached a tentative deal on a collective bargaining agreement to end the 113-day lockout. (It became official five days later.) In 2014 The U.S. Supreme Court ordered a halt to samesex marriages in Utah, putting on hold a federal district judge’s ruling Dec. 20 that said homosexuals have a constitutional right to marry. Also in 2014, gunmen killed Monica Spear, a popular soap-opera actress and former Miss Venezuela, and her ex-husband during a robbery attempt in western Venezuela. Their 5-year-old daughter was wounded in the car attack.