TODAY IN HISTORY

1797

Composer Franz Schubert was born in Vienna.

1863

During the Civil War, the First South Carolina Volunteers, an all-black Union regiment composed of many escaped slaves, was mustered into federal service at Beaufort, South Carolina.

1865

The U.S. House of Representatives joined the Senate in passing the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution abolishing slavery, sending it to states for ratification. (The amendment was adopted in December 1865.)

1919

Baseball Hall-of-famer Jackie Robinson was born in Cairo, Georgia.

1945

Pvt. Eddie Slovik, 24, became the first U.S. soldier since the Civil War to be executed for desertion as he was shot by an American firing squad in France.

1961

NASA launched Ham the Chimp aboard a Mercuryredstone rocket from Cape Canaveral; Ham was recovered safely from the Atlantic Ocean following his 16 1⁄2-minute suborbital flight.

1971

Astronauts Alan Shepard, Edgar Mitchell and Stuart Roosa blasted off aboard Apollo 14 on a mission to the moon.

2000

An Alaska Airlines MD-83 jet crashed into the Pacific Ocean off Port Hueneme (wy-nee’-mee), California, killing all 88 people aboard.

2001

A Scottish court sitting in the Netherlands convicted one Libyan and acquitted a second, in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Abdel Basset Ali al-megrahi was given a life sentence, but was released after eight years on compassionate grounds by Scotland’s government. He died in 2012.)

2015

Bobbi Kristina Brown, the daughter of the late singer Whitney Houston, was found unresponsive in a bathtub at her Georgia townhome and was taken to an Atlanta-area hospital. (She died six months later.)

2020

The United States declared a public health emergency over the new coronavirus, and President Donald Trump signed an order to temporarily bar entry to foreign nationals, other than immediate family of U.S. citizens, who had traveled in China within the preceding 14days. The Senate narrowly rejected Democratic demands to summon witnesses for President Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial.