TODAY IN HISTORY

1558: Elizabeth I acceded to the English throne upon the death of her half-sister, Queen Mary, beginning a 44-year reign.

1800: Congress held its first session in the partially completed U.S. Capitol building.

1869: The Suez Canal opened in Egypt.

1889: The Union Pacific Railroad Co. began direct, daily railroad service between Chicago and Portland, Oregon, as well as Chicago and San Francisco.

1911: The African-American fraternity Omega Psi Phi was founded at Howard University in Washington, D.C.

1947: President Harry S. Truman, in an address to a special session of Congress, called for emergency aid to Austria, Italy and France. (The aid was approved the following month.)

1970: The Soviet Union landed an unmanned, remote-controlled vehicle on the moon, Lunokhod 1.

1973: President Richard Nixon told Associated Press managing editors in Orlando, Fla.: “People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.”

1979: Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini ordered the release of 13 black and/or female American hostages being held at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

1997: Sixty-two people, most of them foreign tourists, were killed when militants opened fire at the Temple of Hatshepsut in Luxor, Egypt; the attackers were killed by police.

2002: Abba Eban, the statesman who helped persuade the world to approve creation of Israel and dominated Israeli diplomacy for decades, died near Tel Aviv; he was 87.

2003: Arnold Schwarzenegger was sworn in as the

38th governor of California.

2006: Former “Seinfeld” co-star Michael Richards unleashed a barrage of racial epithets during a stand-up routine at the Laugh Factory in West Hollywood.

2009: President Barack Obama held formal, closed-door talks in Beijing with Chinese President Hu Jintao. Sarah Palin’s autobiography “Going Rogue” was released; 1 million copies sold in less than two weeks.

2014: Dr. Martin Salia, a surgeon who’d contracted Ebola in his native Sierra Leone, died at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, two days after being admitted.