Today in History
Today is Wednesday, Oct. 11, the 284th day of 2023. There are 81 days left in the year. Today’s Highlight in History:
On Oct. 11, 1991, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Anita Hill accused Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexually harassing her; Thomas re-appeared before the panel to denounce the proceedings as a “high-tech lynching.”
On this date:
• In 1614, the New Netherland Co. was formed by a group of merchants from Amsterdam and Hoorn to set up fur trading in North America.
• In 1809, just over three years after the famous Lewis and Clark expedition ended, Meriwether Lewis was found dead in a Tennessee inn, an apparent suicide; he was 35.
• In 1884, future first lady Eleanor Roosevelt was born in New York City.
• In 1906, the San Francisco Board of Education ordered the city’s Asian students segregated into their own school. (The order was later rescinded at the behest of President Theodore Roosevelt, who promised to curb future Japanese immigration to the United States.)
• In 1968, Apollo 7, the first manned Apollo mission, was launched with astronauts Wally Schirra (shih-rah’), Donn Fulton Eisele and R. Walter Cunningham aboard.
• In 1984, Challenger astronaut Kathryn D. Sullivan became the first American woman to walk in space as she and fellow Mission Specialist David C. Leestma spent 3 1/2 hours outside the shuttle.
• In 1986, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev opened two days of talks in Reykjavik, Iceland, concerning arms control and human rights.
• In 2002, former President Jimmy Carter was named the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
• In 2005, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it had finished pumping out the New Orleans metropolitan area, which was flooded by Hurricane Katrina six weeks earlier and then was swamped again by Hurricane Rita.
• In 2006, the charge of treason was used for the first time in the U.S. war on terrorism, filed against Adam Yehiye Gadahn (AH-DAHM’ Yeh’-heh-yuh GUHDAHN’), also known as “Azzam the American,” who’d appeared in propaganda videos for al-qaida.
• In 2014, customs and health officials began taking the temperatures of passengers arriving at New York’s Kennedy International Airport from three West African countries in a stepped-up screening effort meant to prevent the spread of the Ebola virus.
• In 2017, the Boy Scouts of America announced that it would admit girls into the Cub Scouts starting in 2018 and establish a new program for older girls based on the Boy Scout curriculum, allowing them to aspire to the Eagle Scout rank.
• In 2020, Lebron James and the Los Angeles Lakers beat the Miami Heat to win the NBA finals in six games as the NBA wrapped up a season that sent players to a “bubble” at Walt Disney World in Florida for three months because of the pandemic.
• In 2021, Jon Gruden resigned as coach of the Las Vegas Raiders following reports about messages he wrote years earlier that used offensive terms to refer to Blacks, gays and women.
• In 2022, NASA announced that a spacecraft that plowed into a small, harmless asteroid millions of miles away succeeded in shifting its orbit, a test aimed at fending off any more dangerous asteroids in the future.