1994—Charles Rodman Campbell does his best to dodge it, but Washington State’s hangman finally manages to get a noose around his neck.
1980—Peace returns to Gwangju, South Korea the old fashioned way: troops kill thousands of civilians.
1972—Nixon’s “Plumbers” fail for a second time to break into Democratic National HQ at the Watergate.
1962—Centralia, Pa. officials set a fire to clear an underground landfill. The fire spreads to a coal seam; the town is later abandoned. The fire is expected to burn another 250 years.
1959—NBC’s Today Show reports straight-faced on the Society for Indecency to Naked Animals’ satirical campaign to clothe quadrupeds.
1944—NBC censors Eddie Cantor: his song, “We’re Having a Baby, My Baby and Me” is too lewd for radio.
1941—Biplanes sink the Bismark.
1940—As Brits evacuate Dunkirk, Captain Jack Churchill drops a Nazi with an arrow from his longbow.
1923—Arch-fiend Heinz Alfred Kissinger is born in Fürth, Bavaria.
1902—Luna Park’s owners poison then electrocute Topsy the Elephant. Edison’s cameras film the event.
1895—The Supreme Court perverts the Sherman Anti-Trust Act into a tool bosses can use to bust unions.
1702—“I am about to—or I am going to—die;” says the unsufferably pedantic French grammarian Dominique Bouhours, “either expression is used.”