Today in History

Hurricane Fran comes ashore near Cape Fear, No. Car. It will kill 27 people and cause more than $3 billion in damage.

Katerina Graham, actress, model, singer, dancer (The Vampire Diaries TV series).

Space Shuttle Discovery lands afters its maiden voyage.

World’s longest tunnel opens; Switzerland’s St. Gotthard Tunnel stretches 10.14 miles (16.224 km) from Goschenen to Airolo.

Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat begin discussions on a peace process, at Camp David, Md.

Voyager 1 space probe launched.

President Gerald Ford evades an assassination attempt in Sacramento, California.

“”Black September,” a Palestinian terrorist group take 11 Israeli athletes hostage at the Olympic Games in Munich; by midnight all hostages and all but 3 terrorists are dead.

Charges are brought against US lieutenant William Calley in the March 1968 My Lai Massacre during Vietnam War.

Leopold Sedar Sengingor, poet and politician, is elected president of Senegal, Africa.

Martin Luther King Jr. is arrested in an Alabama protest for loitering and fined $14 for refusing to obey police.

Victor Davis Hanson, military historian, columnist; received National Humanities Award (2007).

Cathy Guisewite, cartoonist, creator of Cathy.

Al Stewart, singer, songwriter, musician (“Year of the Cat,” “Roads to Moscow”).

Germany launches its first V-2 missile at Paris, France.

Werner Herzog (Stipetic), director, producer, screenwriter, actor; a leading figure in New German Cinema (Heart of Glass, Encounters at the End of the World).

Raquel Welch, actress (One Million Years B.C., Myra Breckinridge).

Carol Lawrence, actress and singer (Maria in Broadway version of West Side Story).

Bob Newhart, deadpan standup comedian and TV actor (The Bob Newhart Show).

Jack Valenti, an American film executive who created the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) voluntary system for rating film content as a guide for parents.

Franklin “Frank” Thomas, one of the “Nine Old Men” among Walt Disney’s team of animators.

Marie Curie demonstrates the transformation of radium ore to metal at the Academy of Sciences in France.

Arthur Koestler, Hungarian novelist and essayist who wrote about communism in Darkness at Noon and The Ghost in the Machine.

A.C. Nielsen, founder of the Nielsen Ratings.

Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, Bill Tilghman and Clay Allison, four of the West’s most famous gunmen, meet in Dodge City, Kansas.

The great Sioux warrior Crazy Horse is fatally bayoneted at age 36 by a soldier at Fort Robinson, Nebraska.

Author Victor Hugo returns to Paris from the Isle of Guernsey where he had lived in exile for almost 20 years.

The first shipment of cattle leaves Abilene, Kansas, on a Union Pacific train headed to Chicago.

Harriot E. Wilson’s Our Nig, is published, the first U.S. novel by an African American woman.

Jesse James, legendary outlaw of the American West.

Louis XVIII of France dissolves the chamber of deputies, which has been challenging his authority.

US Navy lieutenant Richard Somers and members of his crew are buried at Tripoli; they died when USS Intrepid exploded while entering Tripoli harbor on a mission to destroy the enemy fleet there during the First Barbary War.

Maximilien Robespierre is elected to the National Convention in France.

The Fire of London is extinguished after two days.

After days of negotiation, the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam surrenders to the British, who will rename it New York.

Louis XIV, “The Sun King” of France who built the palace at Versailles.

Tommaso Campanella, Italian philosopher and poet, who wrote City of the Sun.