This Day in History
In Alaska
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• In 1975, nine high school students and four chaperones from Craig, on Prince of Wales Island, returned from a month-long trip to China.
In the nation
• In 1634, Maryland was founded by English colonists sent by Lord Baltimore.
• In 1865, during the Civil War, Confederate forces attacked Fort Stedman in Virginia, but were forced to withdraw by counterattacking Union troops.
• In 1894, Jacob S. Coxey began leading an "army" of unemployed from Massillon, Ohio, to Washington to demand help from the federal government.
• In 1911, 146 immigrant workers were killed when fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company in New York.
• In 1947, a coal mine explosion in Centralia, Ill., claimed 111 lives.
• In 1965, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led 25,000 marchers to the state capitol in Montgomery, Ala., to protest the denial of voting rights to blacks.
• In 1990, 87 people, most of them Honduran and Dominican immigrants, were killed when fire raced through an illegal social club in New York City.
• In 1996, the redesigned $100 bill went into circulation.
• In 1997, the Federal Reserve nudged interest rates higher for the first time in two years, hoping to stifle any threat of rising inflation. Gov. Zell Miller of Georgia signed into law a ban on a controversial form of late-term abortion. Former President George Bush, at age 73, parachuted from a plane over the Arizona desert.
• In 2006, in Los Angeles, 500,000 people marched to protest federal legislation to make illegal immigration a felony and build more walls along the border. In Seattle, Aaron Kyle Huff opened fire in a house full of ravers, killing six of them before killing himself.
In the world
• In 1807, Britain abolished its slave trade.
• In 1957, the Treaty of Rome established the European Economic Community.
• In 1975, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia was shot to death by a nephew with a history of mental illness. (The nephew was beheaded in June 1975.)
• In 2002, a powerful earthquake rocked Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan, killing up to 1,000 people.
• In 2006, Kimmie Meissner won the ladies' World Figure Skating Championships title in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.