TODAY IN HISTORY

1854: Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s famous poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” was published in England.

1911: An explosion inside the Cross Mountain coal mine near Briceville, Tenn., killed 84 workers. (Five were rescued.)

1940: British troops opened their first major offen

sive in North Africa during World War II.

1958: The anti-communist John Birch Society was

formed in Indianapolis.

1962: The Petrified Forest in Arizona was desig

nated a national park.

1965: The James Bond film “Thunderball,” starring

Sean Connery, had its world premiere in Tokyo. 1987: The first Palestinian intefadeh, or uprising, began as riots broke out in Gaza and spread to the West Bank, triggering a strong Israeli response.

1990: Solidarity founder Lech Walesa won Poland’s

presidential runoff by a landslide.

1992: Britain’s Prince Charles and Princess Diana announced their separation. (The couple’s divorce became final in Aug. 1996.)

2000: The U-S Supreme Court ordered a temporary halt in the Florida vote count on which Al Gore pinned his best hopes of winning the White House.

2001: The United States disclosed the existence of a videotape in which Osama bin Laden said he was pleasantly surprised by the extent of damage from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

2010: In Britain’s worst political violence in years, student protesters rained sticks and rocks on riot police, vandalized government buildings and attacked a car carrying Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, after lawmakers approved a controversial hike in university tuition fees. Actor Wesley Snipes began serving a three-year sentence at a federal prison in Pennsylvania for failure to file income tax returns. Florida’s Clemency Board pardoned Jim Morrison for indecent exposure and profanity charges stemming from a Doors concert in 1969. John du Pont, the chemical fortune heir who killed Olympic gold medal wrestler David Schultz in 1996, died in prison at age 72.

2013: Scientists revealed that NASA’s Curiosity rover had uncovered signs of an ancient freshwater lake on Mars.