Today In History

1634: Maryland was founded by English colonists sent by the second Lord Baltimore.

1865: During the Civil War, Confederate forces captured Fort Stedman in Virginia.

1894: Jacob S. Coxey began leading an “army” of unemployed from Massillon, Ohio, to Washington, D.C., to demand help from the federal government.

1911: 146 immigrant workers were killed when fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. in New York.

1918: French composer Claude Debussy died in Paris.

1947: A coal mine explosion in Centralia, Ill., claimed 111 lives.

1957: The Treaty of Rome established the European Economic Community.

1965: The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led 25,000 marchers to the state capitol in Montgomery, Ala., to protest the denial of voting rights to blacks.

1987: The Supreme Court ruled employers may sometimes favor women and members of minority groups over men and whites in hiring and promoting in order to achieve better balance in the work force.

1990: 87 people, most of them Honduran and Dominican immigrants, were killed when fire raced through an illegal social club in New York City.

1992: Libyan leader Col. Moammar Gadhafi backed away from an offer to turn over two suspects in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 to the Arab League.

1992: Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, who’d spent 10 months aboard the orbiting Mir space station, thereby missing the upheaval in his homeland, finally returned to Earth.

1996: First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, accompanied by her daughter, Chelsea, visited U.S. troops in Bosnia.