This Day in History

In Alaska and in the Nation

In Alaska

• In 1903, Homer Bird was hanged at Sitka for a murder committed on the Yukon.

• In 1910, the weekly newspaper The Alaska Citizen was established in Fairbanks.

• In 1913, Congress reduced the appropriation for the First Territorial Legislature to $46,260. Half the money was for legislators salaries.

• In 1973, voters went to the polls in a special election to choose between Emil Notti and Don Young to replace U.S. Congressman Nick Begich, who was killed in a plane crash.

• In 1988, a 7.6 magnitude earthquake was reported in the Gulf of Alaska.

In the nation

• In 1836, the Alamo in San Antonio, Texas, fell to Mexican forces after a 13-day siege.

• In 1857, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that Scott, a slave, was not a U.S. citizen and could not sue for his freedom in federal court.

• In 1933, a nationwide bank holiday declared by President Franklin D. Roosevelt went into effect.

• In 1983, in a case that drew much notoriety, a young woman was gang-raped atop a pool table in a tavern in New Bedford, Mass., called Big Dan's; four men were later convicted of the attack.

• In 1988, the board of trustees at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., a liberal arts college for the deaf, selected Elisabeth Zinser, a hearing woman, to be school president. (Outraged students shut down the campus, forcing selection of a deaf president, I. King Jordan, instead.)

• In 1998, the Army honored three Americans who'd risked their lives and turned their weapons on fellow soldiers to stop the slaughter of Vietnamese villagers at My Lai in 1968. A Connecticut state lottery accountant shot to death three supervisors and the lottery chief before killing himself.

• In 2003, a somber President Bush readied the nation for war against Saddam Hussein, hurling some of his harshest invectives yet at the Iraqi leader during a prime-time news conference.