| On this date in: |
| 1901 |
Queen Victoria died at age 81 after 63 years on the British throne. |
| 1905 |
Russian troops opened fired on marching workers in St. Petersburg, killing more than 100 in what became known as “Bloody Sunday.” |
| 1922 |
Pope Benedict XV died. |
| 1938 |
Thornton Wilder’s play “Our Town” premiered in Princeton, N.J. |
| 1944 |
Allied forces began landing at Anzio, Italy, during World War II. |
| 1953 |
The Arthur Miller drama “The Crucible” opened on Broadway. |
| 1968 |
“Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” premiered on NBC. |
| 1970 |
The Boeing 747 went on its first regularly scheduled commercial flight, from New York to London. |
| 1973 |
Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th president of the United States, died at his ranch in Johnson City, Texas, at age 64. |
| 1995 |
Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, the mother of President John F. Kennedy, died in Hyannis Port, Mass., at age 104. |
| 1997 |
The Senate confirmed Madeleine Albright as the nation’s first female secretary of state. |
| 1998 |
Theodore Kaczynski pleaded guilty in Sacramento, Calif., to being the Unabomber in return for a sentence of life in prison without parole. |
| 2008 |
Jose Padilla, once accused of plotting with al-Qaida to blow up a radioactive “dirty bomb,” was sentenced by a U.S. federal judge in Miami to more than 17 years in prison on terrorism conspiracy charges. |
| 2009 |
President Barack Obama ordered the terrorist detention center at Guantanamo Bay closed within a year and banned harsh interrogation of terror suspects. (The prison remains open.) |
| 2010 |
Conan O’Brien ended his brief tenure as host of “The Tonight Show” after accepting a $45 million buyout from NBC to leave the show after only seven months. |
