This Day in History In the nation

• In 1935, Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in Akron, Ohio.

• In 1964, the Senate voted to limit further debate on a proposed civil rights bill, shutting off a filibuster by Southern states.

• In 1977, James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., escaped from Brushy Mountain State Prison in Tennessee with six others; he was recaptured June 13.

• In 1982, the play "Torch Song Trilogy," by Harvey Fierstein, opened on Broadway.

• In 1985, socialite Claus von Bulow was acquitted by a jury in Providence, R.I., at his retrial on charges he'd tried to murder his heiress wife, Martha "Sunny" von Bulow.

• In 1998, a jury in Jacksonville, Fla., ordered Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. to pay nearly $1 million to the family of Roland Maddox, who had died after smoking Lucky Strikes for nearly 50 years. (However, a Florida appeals court later overturned the verdict.)

• In 2003, a rocket holding the first of two Mars rovers, Spirit, blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Fla. (Spirit arrived on Mars in January 2004.)

• In 1865, the Richard Wagner opera "Tristan und Isolde" premiered in Munich, Germany.

• In 1907, 11 men in five cars set out from the French embassy in Beijing on a race to Paris. (Prince Scipione Borghese of Italy was the first to arrive in the French capital two months later.)

• In 1940, Italy declared war on France and Britain; Canada declared war on Italy.

• In 1942, the Gestapo massacred 173 male residents of Lidice, Czechoslovakia, in retaliation for the killing of a Nazi official.

• In 1967, the Middle East War ended as Israel and Syria agreed to observe a United Nations-mediated cease-fire.