TODAY IN HISTORY

1901: Britain’s Queen Victoria died at age 81 after a reign of 63 years; she was succeeded by her eldest son, Edward VII.

1938: Thornton Wilder’s play “Our Town” was performed publicly for the first time in Princeton, New Jersey.

1944: During World War II, Allied forces began

landing at Anzio, Italy.

1947: America’s first commercially licensed television station west of the Mississippi, KTLA-TV in Los Angeles, made its official debut.

1953: The Arthur Miller drama “The Crucible”

opened on Broadway.

1973: The U.S. Supreme Court, in its Roe v. Wade decision, declared a nationwide constitutional right to abortion.

1995: Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy died at the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, at age 104.

1997: The Senate confirmed Madeleine Albright as

the nation’s first female secretary of state.

1998: Theodore Kaczynski pleaded guilty in Sacramento, California, to being the Unabomber responsible for three deaths and 29 injuries in return for a sentence of life in prison without parole.

2006: Kobe Bryant scored 81 points, the second-highest in NBA history, in the Los Angeles Lakers’ 122-104 victory over the Toronto Raptors.

2008: Actor Heath Ledger, age 28, was found dead of an accidental prescription overdose in a New York City apartment.

2009: President Barack Obama signed an executive order to close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp within a year. (The facility remained in operation as lawmakers blocked efforts to transfer terror suspects to the United States; President Donald Trump later issued an order to keep the jail open and allow the Pentagon to bring new prisoners there.)

2012: Longtime Penn State coach Joe Paterno, who’d won more games than anyone in major college football but was fired amid a child sex abuse scandal that scarred his reputation, died at age 85.

2013: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-line bloc fared worse than expected in a parliamentary election, forcing Netanyahu to negotiate a broad coalition deal.