TODAY IN HISTORY
1935: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law, ensuring income for elderly Americans and creating a federal unemployment insurance program.
1936: In front of an estimated 20,000 spectators, Rainey Bethea was hanged in Owensboro, Kentucky in the last public execution in the United States.
1942: President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter, which detailed the post-war goals of the two nations.
1945: President Harry S. Truman announced that Imperial Japan had surrendered unconditionally, ending World War II.
1947: Pakistan gained independence from British rule.
1994: Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the terrorist known as “Carlos the Jackal,” was captured by French agents in Sudan.
1995: Shannon Faulkner officially became the first female cadet in the history of The Citadel, South Carolina’s state military college. (However, Faulkner quit the school less than a week later, citing the stress of her court fight, and her isolation among the male cadets.)
1997: An unrepentant Timothy McVeigh was formally sentenced to death for the Oklahoma City bombing. (McVeigh was executed by lethal injection in 2001.)
2009: Charles Manson follower Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, 60, convicted of trying to assassinate President Gerald Ford in 1975, was released from a Texas prison hospital after more than three decades behind bars.
2016: Usain Bolt became the first athlete to win the 100m dash in three consecutive Olympics, taking gold at the Summer Games in Rio.
2021: A 7.2-magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, turning thousands of structures into rubble; the quake left more than 2,200 people dead and injured more than 12,000 others.