TODAY IN HISTORY

1743: The third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, was born in Shadwell in the Virginia Colony.

1861: At the start of the Civil War, Fort Sumter in South Carolina fell to Confederate forces.

1943: President Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicated the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., on the 200th anniversary of the third American president’s birth.

1953: “Casino Royale,” Ian Fleming’s first book as well as the first James Bond novel, was published in London by Jonathan Cape Ltd.

1964: Sidney Poitier became the first Black performer to win an Academy Award for best actor or best actress with his performance in “Lilies of the Field.”

1970: Apollo 13, four-fifths of the way to the moon, was crippled when a tank containing liquid oxygen burst. (The astronauts managed to return safely.)

1997: Tiger Woods became the youngest person to win the Masters Tournament.

1999: Right-to-die advocate Dr. Jack Kevorkian was sentenced in Pontiac, Mich., to 10 to 25 years in prison for second-degree murder in the lethal injection of a Lou Gehrig’s disease patient. (Kevorkian ended up serving eight years.)

2005: A defiant Eric Rudolph pleaded guilty to carrying out the deadly bombing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and three other attacks in back-to-back court appearances in Birmingham, Ala., and Atlanta.

2009: At his second trial, music producer Phil Spector was found guilty by a Los Angeles jury of second-degree murder in the shooting of actor Lana Clarkson (he was later sentenced to 19 years to life in prison; he died in prison in January 2021).

2011: A federal jury in San Francisco convicted baseball slugger Barry Bonds of a single charge of obstruction of justice, but failed to reach a verdict on the three counts at the heart of allegations that he’d knowingly used steroids and human growth hormone and lied to a grand jury about it. (Bonds’ conviction for obstruction was ultimately overturned.)

2012: Jennifer Capriati was elected to the International Tennis Hall of Fame.