TODAY IN HISTORY

1909

President William Howard Taft accepted the recommendation of a joint Army-Navy board that Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands be made the principal U.S. naval station in the Pacific.

1921

The remains of an unidentified American service member were interred in a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery in a ceremony presided over by President Warren G. Harding.

1620

41 Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower, anchored off Massachusetts, signed a compact calling for a “body politick.”

1831

Former slave Nat Turner, who’d led a violent insurrection, was executed in Jerusalem, Virginia.