This day in History
In Alaska
• In 1901, Professor Leonard, the aeronaut, performed acrobatic feats on a horizontal bar suspended from a large balloon over the Bering Sea near Nome.
• In 1947, bidding was opened by the U.S. Forest Service on 1.5 billion cubic feet of timber in the Ketchikan area. This was part of a plan to establish five or six large paper mills in Alaska.
In the nation
• In 1893, hundreds of thousands of settlers swarmed onto a section of land in Oklahoma known as the "Cherokee Strip."
• In 1919, the American Legion was incorporated by an act of Congress.
• In 1940, President Roosevelt signed into law the Selective Training and Service Act, which set up the first peacetime military draft in U.S. history.
• In 1953, "The Robe," the first movie filmed in the widescreen process CinemaScope, had its world premiere at the Roxy Theater in New York.
• In 1974, President Ford announced a conditional amnesty program for Vietnam war deserters and draft-evaders.
In the world
• In 1638, France's King Louis the XIV was born.
• In 1810, Mexico began its revolt against Spanish rule.
• In 1982, the massacre of hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children by Lebanese Christian militiamen began in west Beirut's Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps.
• In 1993, a judge in Berlin convicted three elderly former communist leaders in the shooting deaths of East Germans who had tried to scale the Berlin Wall.
• In 2002, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced that Iraq had unconditionally accepted the return of U.N. weapons inspectors.