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In Alaska

• In 1863, Prince Dimitri Maksoutoff became the last Alaska chief manager of the Russian American Co.

• In 1903, the B.M. Behrends Mercantile Co. was incorporated in Juneau.

• In 1959, Phil Holdsworth, then commissioner of Natural Resources, said, "We'll flood the Bureau of Land Management with applications in the next six months," as the state increased the pace of acquiring the 104 million acres of land granted by the Statehood Act.

• In 1974, Jay S. Hammond took office as the fifth governor of Alaska.

• In 1980, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter.

In the nation

• In 1823, President James Monroe outlined his doctrine opposing European expansion in the Western Hemisphere.

• In 1859, militant abolitionist John Brown was hanged for his raid on Harpers Ferry, Va., the previous October.

• In 1927, Ford Motor Co. formally unveiled its Model A automobile, the successor to its Model T.

• In 1942, an artificially created, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction was demonstrated for the first time, at the University of Chicago.

• In 1954, the Senate voted to condemn Wisconsin Republican Joseph R. McCarthy for conduct that "tends to bring the Senate into disrepute."

• In 1957, the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania, the first full-scale commercial nuclear facility in the U.S., began operations. (The reactor ceased operating in 1982.)

• In 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency began operating under director William Ruckelshaus.

• In 1982, in the first operation of its kind, doctors at the University of Utah Medical Center implanted a permanent artificial heart in the chest of retired dentist Dr. Barney Clark, who lived 112 days with the device.

• In 1998, former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy was acquitted of all counts in a corruption case involving sports tickets and travel that he'd accepted from companies that did business with his department.

• In 2003, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that after knocking, police don't have to wait longer than 20 seconds before breaking into the home of a drug suspect. Authorities in Ohio announced that they had linked 12 shootings along a five-mile stretch of interstate around Columbus, including one that killed a woman and another that broke a window at an elementary school. (A suspect, Charles A. McCoy Jr., later pleaded guilty to manslaughter and 10 other charges, and was sentenced to 27 years in prison.)

• In 2007, Brian Wilson, Martin Scorsese, Steve Martin, Diana Ross and pianist Leon Fleisher were the latest U.S. artists to receive Kennedy Center honors for their career achievements.

In the world

• In 1804, Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of the French.

• In 1980, four American churchwomen were raped and murdered outside San Salvador, El Salvador. (Five national guardsmen were convicted in the killings.)

• In 1988, Benazir Bhutto was sworn in as prime minister of Pakistan.

• In 2007, Venezuela President Hugo Chavez suffered a defeat as voters rejected sweeping constitutional reforms by 51 to 49 percent. Russian President Vladimir Putin's party swept 70 percent of the seats for a new parliament in a vote whose fairness was called into question by European election monitors.