This Day in History

In Alaska

• Photos

• In 1946, the Auke Bay post office north of Juneau officially opened for business.

In the Nation

• In 1823, the poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas" by Clement C. Moore was published in the Troy, N.Y., Sentinel.

• In 1987, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, serving a life sentence for the attempted assassination of President Ford in 1975, escaped from the Alderson Federal Prison for Women in West Virginia. (She was recaptured two days later.)

• In 1992, an American mission to save lives in Somalia lost the first of its own when a U.S. vehicle hit a land mine near Bardera, killing civilian Army employee Lawrence N. Freedman of Fayetteville, N.C.

• In 1997, a jury in Denver convicted Terry Nichols of involuntary manslaughter and conspiracy for his role in the Oklahoma City bombing, declining to find him guilty of murder.

In the World

• In 1948, former Japanese premier Hideki Tojo and six other Japanese war leaders were executed in Tokyo.

• In 1968, 82 crew members of the U.S. intelligence ship Pueblo were released by North Korea, 11 months after they had been captured.