Today in History

1760   Cherokee Indians held hostage at Fort St. George are killed in revenge for Indian attacks on frontier settlements.  
1804   US Navy lieutenant Steven Decatur leads a small group of sailors into Tripoli harbor and burns the USS Philadelphia, captured earlier by Barbary pirates.  
1862   Fort Donelson, Tennessee, falls to Grant's Federal forces, but not before Nathan Bedford Forrest escapes.  
1865   Columbia, South Carolina, surrenders to Federal troops.  
1923   Bessie Smith makes her first recording "Down Hearted Blues."  
1934   Thousands of Socialists battle Communists at a rally in New York's Madison Square Garden.  
1937   Dupont patents a new thread, nylon, which will replace silk in a number of products and reduce costs.  
1940   The British destroyer HMS Cossack rescues British seamen from a German prison ship, the Altmark, in a Norwegian fjord.  
1942   Tojo outlines Japan's war aims to the Diet, referring to "new order of coexistence" in East Asia.  
1945   American paratroopers land on Corregidor, in a campaign to liberate the Philippines.
1951   Stalin contends the U.N. is becoming the weapon of aggressive war.  
1952   The FBI arrests 10 members of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina.  
1957   A U.S. flag flies over an outpost in Wilkes Land, Antarctica.  
1959   Fidel Castro takes the oath as Cuban premier in Havana.  
1965   Four persons are held in a plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty, Liberty Bell and the Washington Monument.  
1966   The World Council of Churches being held in Geneva, urges immediate peace in Vietnam.
1978   China and Japan sign a $20 billion trade pact, which is the most important move since the 1972 resumption of diplomatic ties.