This Day in History
In Alaska
• In 1911, Mount Wrangell erupted and Central Alaska was shaken by an earthquake.
• In 1959, Rep. Ralph Rivers, an Alaska Democrat, proposed a bill to ban nearly all imports of Japanese salmon.
In the nation
• In 1861, Jefferson Davis of Mississippi and four other Southerners resigned from the U.S. Senate.
• In 1915, the first Kiwanis Club was founded, in Detroit.
• In 1942, Count Basie and his orchestra recorded "One O'Clock Jump" in New York for Okeh Records.
• In 1950, former State Department official Alger Hiss, accused of being part of a Communist spy ring, was found guilty in New York of lying to a grand jury. (Hiss, who always maintained his innocence, served less than four years in prison.)
• In 1954, the first atomic submarine, the USS Nautilus, was launched at Groton, Conn.
• In 1977, President Carter pardoned almost all Vietnam War draft evaders.
• In 1997, Speaker Newt Gingrich was reprimanded and fined as the House voted for first time in history to discipline its leader for ethical misconduct.
• In 1998, President Clinton angrily denied reports he'd had an affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky and tried to get her to lie about it.
In the world
• In 1793, during the French Revolution, King Louis XVI, condemned for treason, was executed on the guillotine.
• In 1924, Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin died at age 54.
• In 1950, George Orwell, author of "1984," died in London.
• In 1976, the supersonic Concorde jet was put into service by Britain and France.
• In 1993, two U.S. warplanes fired on and bombed an Iraqi air defense radar site in northern Iraq after radar was turned on them - Iraq denied provoking the attack.