This Day In History
- 1542 Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto died while searching for gold along the Mississippi River.
- 1832 The first Democratic National Convention got under way, in Baltimore.
- 1840 New Zealand was declared a British colony.
- 1881 Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross.
- 1892 The opera ''I Pagliacci'' by Ruggiero Leoncavallo was first performed, in Milan, Italy.
- 1924 Nathan Leopold Jr. and Richard Loeb, two students at the University of Chicago, killed a 14-year-old boy in a ''thrill killing.''
- 1956 The United States exploded the first airborne hydrogen bomb over Bikini Atoll in the Pacific.
- 1959 The musical ''Gypsy'' opened on Broadway.
- 1968 The nuclear-powered U.S. submarine Scorpion, with 99 men aboard, was last heard from. (The remains of the sub were later found on the ocean floor 400 miles southwest of the Azores.)
- 1979 Former San Francisco City Supervisor Dan White was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in the shooting deaths of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk; White's argument that junk food had fueled his rampage was derided as the ''Twinkie defense.''
- 1991 Former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by a suicide bomber.
- 1998 A 15-year-old student open fired inside Thurston High School in Springfield, Ore., killing two students and wounding 23, one day after killing his parents.
- 1999 Susan Lucci, star of the ABC soap opera ''All My Children,'' won a Daytime Emmy Award for best actress for the first time in the 19th straight year she was nominated.
- 2003 Christie Whitman resigned as Environmental Protection Agency administrator.
- 1917 Raymond (William Stacy) Burr (actor: Perry Mason, Ironside)
- 1921 Andrei Sakharov (physicist: produced first Soviet atomic bomb, also hydrogen bomb; human rights activist: formulated concepts of perestroika and glasnost; died Dec 14, 1989)
- 1923 &nbs/ul>
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