TODAY IN HISTORY
1777: France recognized American independence.
1903: Wilbur and Orville Wright of Dayton, Ohio, conducted the first successful manned powered-airplane flights near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, using their experimental craft, the Wright Flyer.
1933: In the inaugural NFL championship football game, the Chicago Bears defeated the New York Giants, 23-21, at Wrigley Field.
1944: The U.S. War Department announced it was ending its policy of excluding people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast.
1957: The United States successfully test-fired the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile for the first time.
1969: The U.S. Air Force closed its Project “Blue Book” by concluding there was no evidence of extraterrestrial spaceships behind thousands of UFO sightings.
1975: Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme was sentenced in Sacramento to life in prison for her attempt on the life of President Gerald R. Ford. (She was paroled in August, 2009.)
1979: Arthur McDuffie, a Black insurance executive, was beaten by police after leading them on a chase with his motorcycle in Miami. McDuffie died in a hospital four days later. (Four white police officers accused of beating McDuffie were later acquitted, sparking riots.)
1992: President George H.W. Bush, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in separate ceremonies.
2011: North Korean leader Kim Jong Il died after more than a decade of iron rule; he was 69, according to official records, but some reports indicated he was 70.
2012: Newtown, Connecticut, began laying its dead to rest, holding funerals for two 6-year-old boys, the first of the 20 children killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre.
2014: The United States and Cuba restored diplomatic relations, sweeping away one of the last vestiges of the Cold War.
2017: “The Last Jedi” took in $220 million in its debut weekend in North America, good for the second-best opening ever and behind only its predecessor, “The Force Awakens.”