TODAY IN HISTORY

On Dec. 28, 1917, the New York Evening Mail published "A Neglected Anniversary," a facetious essay by H.L. Mencken supposedly recounting the history of bathtubs in America, starting with the "first" one in Cincinnati in 1842. Among the spoof's other straight-faced claims: that Millard Fillmore was the first president to have a bathtub installed in the White House. (Mencken was astonished when people took his "tissue of absurdities" seriously.)

On this date:

In 1612, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei observed the planet Neptune, but mistook it for a star. (Neptune wasn't officially discovered until 1846 by Johann Gottfried Galle.)

In 1832, John C. Calhoun became the first vice president of the United States to resign, stepping down because of differences with President Andrew Jackson.

In 1846, Iowa became the 29th state to be admitted to the Union.

In 1856, the 28th president of the United States, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, was born in Staunton, Virginia.

In 1895, the Lumiere brothers, Auguste and Louis, held the first public showing of their movies in Paris.

In 1937, composer Maurice Ravel died in Paris at age 62.

In 1945, Congress officially recognized the Pledge of Allegiance.

In 1961, the Tennessee Williams play "Night of the Iguana" opened on Broadway. Former first lady Edith Bolling Galt Wilson, the second wife of President Woodrow Wilson, died in Washington at age 89.

In 1973, the book "Gulag Archipelago," Alexander Solzhenitsyn's expose of the Soviet prison system, was first published in Paris.

In 1981, Elizabeth Jordan Carr, the first American "testtube" baby, was born in Norfolk, Virginia.

In 1987, the bodies of 14 relatives of Ronald Gene Simmons were found at his home near Dover, Arkansas, after Simmons shot and killed two other people in Russellville. (Simmons, who never explained his motives, was executed in 1990.)

In 1997, one woman was killed when a United Airlines jumbo jet en route from Narita, Japan, to Honolulu encountered severe turbulence over the Pacific.

Ten years ago: President George W. Bush used a "pocket veto" to reject a sweeping defense bill because he objected to a provision that would have exposed the Iraqi government to expensive lawsuits seeking damages from the Saddam Hussein era. Six French charity workers sentenced to eight years' forced labor in Chad for allegedly trying to kidnap 103 children were transferred to French custody. (The workers were later pardoned by Chad's president and set free.) David Letterman's production company, Worldwide Pants, reached an interim agreement with the Writers Guild allowing his talk show as well as Craig Ferguson's to return to the air with their full writing staffs during a Hollywood writers' strike.