TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY IN HISTORY

2018

A gunman identified as a former student opened fire with a semi-automatic rifle at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School near Fort Lauderdale, Florida, killing 17 people in the nation’s deadliest school shooting since the attack in Newtown, Connecticut, more than five years earlier.

1778

The American ship Ranger carried the recently adopted Stars and Stripes to a foreign port for the first time as it arrived in France.

1876

Inventors Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray applied separately for patents related to the telephone.

1912

Arizona became the 48th state of the Union as President William Howard Taft signed a proclamation.

1920

The League of Women Voters was founded in Chicago; its first president was Maud Wood Park.

1929

The “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” took place in a Chicago garage as seven rivals of Al Capone’s gang were gunned down.

1945

During World War II, British and Canadian forces reached the Rhine River in Germany.

1967

Aretha Franklin recorded her cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect” at Atlantic Records in New York.

1979

Adolph Dubs, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, was kidnapped in Kabul by Muslim extremists and killed in a shootout between his abductors and police.

1989

Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini called on Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie, author of “The Satanic Verses,” a novel condemned as blasphemous.

2019

William Barr was sworn in for his second stint as the nation’s attorney general; he succeeded Jeff Sessions, who’d been pushed out of office by President Donald Trump after Trump denounced Sessions’ decision to recuse himself from the Russia investigation.