This Day in History

In Alaska, in the Nation and the World

In Alaska

• In 1895, Frank Peratrovich, Tlingit leader and first president of the Alaska Senate, was born in Klawock.

• In 1906, Wilford B. Hoggatt took office as the sixth governor of the Territory of Alaska, appointed by President Teddy Roosevelt.

• In 1935, Pacific Alaska Airway began its Juneau-Fairbanks service.

• In 1959, Alaska Airlines applied for routes to Hawaii.

In the nation

• In 1513, Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon landed in present-day Florida.

• In 1792, Congress passed the Coinage Act, which authorized establishment of the U.S. Mint.

• In 1865, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and most of his Cabinet fled the Confederate capital of Richmond, Va., because of advancing Union forces.

• In 1917, President Wilson asked Congress to declare war against Germany, saying, "The world must be made safe for democracy." (Congress declared war four days later.)

• In 1932, aviator Charles Lindbergh and John Condon went to a cemetery in New York, where Condon turned over $50,000 to a man called "John" in exchange for Lindbergh's kidnapped son. (The child was not returned, and was found dead the following month.)

• In 1968, the influential science-fiction film "2001: A Space Odyssey," produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, had its world premiere in Washington.

• In 2007, in its first case on climate change, the Supreme Court declared in a 5-4 ruling that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases were air pollutants under the Clean Air Act. Florida won its second consecutive college basketball championship, beating Ohio State 84-75; the Gators became the first team to repeat since Duke in 1991-92. Coaches Phil Jackson and Roy Williams were among those named to the Basketball Hall of Fame.

In the world

• In 1982, several thousand troops from Argentina seized the disputed Falkland Islands, located in the south Atlantic, from Britain. (Britain took back the islands the following June.)

• In 1986, four American passengers were killed when a bomb exploded aboard a TWA jetliner en route from Rome to Athens, Greece.

• In 1998, shaking their fists in rage, thousands of mourners marched in a funeral procession in the West Bank for a top Hamas bomb maker (Mohiyedine Sharif) hailed by Palestinians as a martyr and condemned by Israel as a terrorist.

• In 2003, American forces fought their way to within sight of the Baghdad skyline; Iraqi soldiers discarded their military uniforms by the roadside to hide their identity. A bomb blast near a wharf in the southern Philippine city of Davao killed 16.

• In 2007, a tsunami in the Solomon Islands killed at least 50 people.