TODAY IN HISTORY

1616: Astronomer Galileo Galilei met with a Roman Inquisition official, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, who ordered him to abandon the “heretical” concept of heliocentrism, which held that the earth revolved around the sun, instead of the other way around.

1904: The United States and Panama proclaimed a treaty under which the U.S. agreed to undertake efforts to build a ship canal across the Panama isthmus.

1917: President Woodrow Wilson signed a congressional act establishing Mount McKinley National Park (now Denali National Park) in the Alaska Territory.

1919: President Woodrow Wilson signed a congressional act establishing Grand Canyon National Park.

1929: President Calvin Coolidge signed a measure establishing Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.

1940: The United States Air Defense Command was created.

1952: Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced that Britain had developed its own atomic bomb.

1966: South Korean troops sent to fight in the Vietnam War massacred at least 380 civilians in Go Dai hamlet.

1984: The last U.S. Marines deployed to Beirut as part of an international peacekeeping force withdrew from the Lebanese capital.

1993: A truck bomb built by Islamic extremists exploded in the parking garage of the North Tower of New York’s World Trade Center, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000.

1994: A jury in San Antonio acquitted 11 followers of David Koresh of murder, rejecting claims they had ambushed federal agents; five were convicted of voluntary manslaughter.

1998: A jury in Amarillo, Texas, rejected an $11 million lawsuit brought by Texas cattlemen who blamed Oprah Winfrey’s talk show for a price fall after a segment on food safety that included a discussion about mad cow disease.