TODAY IN HISTORY

1844: Samuel F.B. Morse transmitted the message “What hath God wrought” from Washington to Baltimore as he formally opened America’s first telegraph line.

1935: The first major league baseball game to be played at night took place at Cincinnati’s Crosley Field as the Reds beat the Philadelphia Phillies, 2-1.

1937: In a set of rulings, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Social Security Act of 1935.

1941: The German battleship Bismarck sank the British battle cruiser HMS Hood in the North Atlantic, killing all but three of the 1,418 men on board.

1961: A group of Freedom Riders was arrested after arriving at a bus terminal in Jackson, Miss., charged with breaching the peace for entering white-designated areas. (They ended up serving 60 days in jail.)

1962: Astronaut Scott Carpenter became the second American to orbit the Earth as he flew aboard Aurora 7.

1974: American jazz composer and bandleader Duke Ellington, 75, died in New York.

1976: Britain and France opened trans-Atlantic Concorde supersonic transport service to Washington. 1980: Iran rejected a call by the World Court in The Hague to release American hostages.

1994: Four Islamic fundamentalists convicted of bombing New York’s World Trade Center in 1993 were each sentenced to 240 years in prison.

1995: Former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson died in London at age 79.

2006: “An Inconvenient Truth,” a documentary about former Vice President Al Gore’s campaign against global warming, went into limited release.

2011: Oprah Winfrey taped the final episode of her long-running talk show.

2022: An 18-year-old gunman opened fire at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, killing 19 children and two teachers. The gunman, Salvador Ramos, a former student at the school, was also killed. It was the deadliest shooting at a U.S. grade school since the attack in Sandy Hook, Conn., almost a decade earlier.