2002—The CIA admits to Congress—in a classified document, to avoid undue alarm—that it had tracked one 9/11 hijacker months earlier than it had previously admitted.
1999—The Virginian-Pilot reports that evangelist Pat Robertson has had “extensive dealings” with Liberian war criminal Charles Taylor.
1976—Don Bolles, investigative reporter for the Arizona Republic, is mortally injured by a bomb under his car. A pair of patsies take the fall.
1972—Alfred W. McCoy explains to Congress that top South Vietnamese officials, the CIA, and the Mafia are all in the heroin racket together.
1971—“Treating [the press] with considerably more contempt,” Nixon writes to Haldeman, “is in the long run a more productive policy.”
1919—Anarchist bombs explode in eight cities. Attorney General Mitchell Palmer’s D.C. home is nearly destroyed; the bomber’s body parts land across the street on FDR’s stoop.
1863—Union troops led by Harriet Tubman liberate 800 enslaved people from Combahee Ferry, S.C.
1855—An Irish mob breaks into Portland, Maine’s City Hall seeking prohibitionist Mayor Neal Dow’s medicinal reserves. Militia fire into the crowd; a sailor is shot dead.
1831—Workers in Wales raise, for the first time, the red flag of revolution.
455—Gaiseric’s Vandals sack Rome, outdoing the Visigoth effort of 410.