2023—Georgia DA Fanni Willis indicts ex-Pres. D.J. Trump for asking Secretary of State Raffensperger to help him try to steal the 2020 election.
1945—President Truman announces Japan has surrendered. Enlisted sailors in San Francisco celebrate their reprieve with three nights of looting, vandalism, rape, and murder.
1936—In Owensboro, Ky., at 5:30 a.m, 15,000 watch as Rainey Bethea becomes the last person publicly hanged in America. Arthur Hash, the assigned executioner, is so drunk a deputy sheriff has to pull the lever.
1935—FDR signs the Social Security Act; the GOP begins trying to gut it.
1912—A New Zealand newspaper warns that CO2 from burning coal has a warming effect on the climate which may prove troublesome.
1908—A would-be lynch mob in Springfield, Ill., frustrated that two Black men had been removed from jail for their safety, begins to riot.
1884—The coffin of Lieut. Frederick F. Kislingbury is exhumed and an autopsy performed in Rochester, N.Y., 10 days after the survivors of the Greely expedition were fêted with a parade in Portsmouth, N.H. The heroes appear to have cannibalized his remains.
1862—Lincoln, at the White House, hosts a delegation of African-Americans, who he offends by suggesting that they should go colonize Panama.
1765—Boston’s Liberty Tree is christened: two figures are hanged in effigy.