2006—George W.[MD] Bush OKs $20 million for a celebration of “success” in Iraq and Afghanistan.
2005—A switching error causes a 2:40 a.m. train wreck in Graniteville, S.C.; 60 tons of chlorine gas escape, killing nine immediately and one months later.
1986—One person dies and 100 are injured in an accident at Kerr-McGee’s nuclear fuel plant in Oklahoma.
1970—The Supreme Court OKs suppression of a GI paper at Fort Bragg.
1951—U.S.-backed South Korean security forces torture and massacre between 212 and 1,300 unarmed suspected commies in Ganghwa.
1947—Children arriving at the one-room schoolhouse in Callahan, Calif. find a lynched black man hanging from a nearby phone pole.
1946—Thousands of GIs storm HQ in the Philippines, protesting slow re-deployment back to the U.S.
1944—RIP Ida Tarbell, pioneering muckraker, in Bridgeport, Conn.
1927—Freelance executioner Robert Greene Elliot electrocutes three convicts in Charlestown, Mass., then three more in Sing Sing, N.Y.
1920—Rev. Sun Myung Moon is born.
1895—Ex-Queen Liliuokalani is arrested in Hawaii after a failed coup against Sanford Dole.
1853—President-elect Franklin Pierce and his wife Jane survive an Andover, Mass. train derailment, but, with two sons dead already, see their third son dead, nearly decapitated.