This Day in History

In Alaska, in the Nation and the World

In Alaska

• In 1954, the Lost River Mine near Seward delivered the largest shipment of tin ever taken from a U.S. mine when 183 tons were unloaded in Seattle.

• In 1970, Secretary of the Interior Walter J. Hickel continued his visit of potential trouble spots along the route of the planned trans-Alaska oil pipeline.

• In 1989, In the Yukon Territory, today is known as Discovery Day.

In the nation

• In 1858, the first of seven debates between Illinois senatorial contenders Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas took place.

• In 1831, former slave Nat Turner led a violent insurrection in Virginia. (He was later executed.)

• In 1878, the American Bar Association was founded in Saratoga, N.Y.

• In 1944, the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union and China opened talks at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington that helped pave the way for establishment of the United Nations.

• In 1959, Hawaii became the 50th state as President Eisenhower signed an executive order, five months after he'd signed the Hawaiian statehood bill.

• In 1998, Samuel H. Bowers, a 73-year-old former Ku Klux Klan leader, was convicted in Hattiesburg, Miss., of ordering a 1966 firebombing that killed civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer. (Bowers died in prison in November 2006 at age 82.)

• In 2003, Alabama's top judge, Chief Justice Roy Moore, refused to back down in his fight to keep a Ten Commandments monument and lashed out at his colleagues who'd ordered it removed from the rotunda of the state judicial building. Palestinian militants abandoned a two-month-old truce after Israel killed a Hamas leader in a missile attack.