This Day in History
In Alaska
• In 1887, a burro pack train, the first in Alaska, made its first trip to Silver Bow Basin near Juneau to bring out gold ore.
• In 1939, two Army helicopters set an unofficial altitude record by landing on and taking off from Mt. Sanford, 16,237 feet high.
• In 1988, a group of 82 natives, politicians, and members of the press made the 45-minute flight from Nome to Provideniya on Friendship Flight One. The flight across the Bering Strait to Siberia was to establish family ties and open up the gateway for a regular flight for tourists.
In the nation
• In 1927, aviation hero Charles Lindbergh was honored with a ticker-tape parade in New York City.
• In 1944, Germany began launching flying-bomb attacks against Britain during World War II.
• In 1966, the Supreme Court issued its landmark Miranda decision, ruling that criminal suspects had to be informed of their constitutional rights prior to questioning by police.
• In 1967, President Johnson nominated Solicitor-General Thurgood Marshall to become the first black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
• In 1971, The New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers, a secret study of America's involvement in Vietnam.
• In 1977, James Earl Ray, the convicted assassin of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., was recaptured following his escape three days earlier from a Tennessee prison.
• In 1983, the U.S. space probe "Pioneer Ten," launched in 1972, became the first spacecraft to leave the solar system as it crossed the orbit of Neptune.
• In 1998, civil rights leaders and politicians called for an end to racial violence as hundreds of mourners gathered in Jasper, Texas, for the funeral of James Byrd Jr., a black man who was brutally killed by white supremacists. President Clinton visited Thurston High School in Springfield, Ore., where two students were killed and 22 others wounded the previous month.
• In 2002, U.S. Roman Catholic bishops held an extraordinary closed-door meeting in Dallas on the sex scandal that had shaken the church as they crafted a plan for a zero-tolerance policy for pedophile priests.
In the world
• In 1900, China's Boxer Rebellion targeting foreigners, as well as Chinese Christians, erupted into full-scale violence.
• In 1981, a scare occurred during a parade in London when a teenager fired six blank shots at Queen Elizabeth II.