TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT

1931

Notre Dame college football coach Knute Rockne, 43, was killed in the crash of a TWA plane in Bazaar, Kan.

ALSO ON THIS DATE 1917

The United States took formal possession of the Virgin Islands from Denmark.

1933

President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Emergency Conservation Work Act, which created the Civilian Conservation Corps.

1943

“Oklahoma!,” the first musical play by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, opened on Broadway.

1968

At the conclusion of a nationally broadcast address on Vietnam, President Lyndon B. Johnson stunned listeners by declaring, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”

1976

The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled that Karen Ann Quinlan, a young woman in a persistent vegetative state, could be disconnected from her respirator.

1991

The Warsaw Pact military alliance came to an end.

1995

Mexican-American singer Selena Quintanilla-Perez, 23, was shot to death in Corpus Christi, Texas, by the founder of her fan club, Yolanda Saldivar, who was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

2004

Four American civilian contractors were killed in Fallujah, Iraq; frenzied crowds dragged the burned, mutilated bodies and strung two of them from a bridge.

2005

Terri Schiavo, 41, died at a hospice in Florida, 13 days after her feeding tube was removed in a wrenching rightto-die court fight.