TODAY IN HISTORY
1794: Maximilien Robespierre and Louis Antoine de Saint-Just were executed by guillotine during the French Revolution.
1914: World War I began as Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia.
1945: A U.S. Army B-25 bomber crashed into the 79th floor of New York’s Empire State Building, the world’s tallest structure at the time, killing 14 people.
1965: President Lyndon B. Johnson announced he was increasing the number of American troops in South Vietnam from 75,000 to 125,000.
1976: An earthquake devastated northern China, killing at least 242,000 people, according to an official estimate.
1984: The Los Angeles Summer Olympics opened; 14 Eastern Bloc countries, led by the Soviet Union, boycotted the Games.
1995: A jury in Union, South Carolina, rejected the death penalty for Susan Smith, sentencing her to life in prison for drowning her two young sons (Smith will be eligible for parole in November 2024).
1996: 8,000 year-old human skeletal remains (later referred to as Kennewick Man) were discovered in a bank of the Columbia River in Kennewick, Washington.
2004: The Irish Republican Army formally announced an end to their armed campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland.
2015: It was announced that Jonathan Pollard, the former U.S. Naval intelligence analyst who had spent nearly three decades in prison for spying for Israel, had been granted parole.
2018: Pope Francis accepted the resignation of U.S. Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the emeritus archbishop of Washington, D.C., following allegations of sexual abuse, including one involving an 11-year-old boy.
2019: A gunman opened fire at a popular garlic festival in Gilroy, Calif., killing three people, including a six-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl, and wounding 17 others before taking his own life.