Today in history

By Associated Press

In 1777, American forces won the Battle of Bennington in what was considered a turning point of the Revolutionary War.

In 1812, Detroit fell to British and Native American forces in the War of 1812.

In 1861, President Abraham Lincoln issued Proclamation 86, which prohibited the states of the Union from engaging in commercial trade with states that were in rebellion — i.e., the Confederacy.

In 1896, gold was discovered in Canada’s Yukon Territory, sparking the “Klondike Fever” that would draw tens of thousands to the region in search of fortune.

In 1948, baseball legend Babe Ruth died in New York at age 53.

In 1954, the first issue of “Sports Illustrated” was released.

In 1962, the Beatles fired their original drummer, Pete Best, replacing him with Ringo Starr.

In 1978, James Earl Ray, convicted assassin of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., told a Capitol Hill hearing he did not commit the crime, saying he’d been set up by a mysterious man called “Raoul.”

In 1987, people worldwide began a two-day celebration of the “Harmonic Convergence,” which heralded what believers called the start of a new, purer age of humankind.

In 2014, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, where police and protesters repeatedly clashed in the week since a Black 18-year-old, Michael Brown, was shot to death by a white police officer.

In 2020, lightning sparked the August Complex wildfire in California. More than 1,600 square miles—greater than the size of Rhode Island—would burn over the following three months.

In 1807, Robert Fulton’s North River Steamboat made its first voyage, heading up the Hudson River on a successful round trip between New York City and Albany.

In 1863, federal batteries and ships began bombarding Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor during the Civil War, but the Confederates managed to hold on despite several days of shelling.

In 1915, a mob in Cobb County, Georgia, lynched Jewish businessman Leo Frank, 31, whose death sentence for the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan had been commuted to life imprisonment. (Frank, who’d maintained his innocence, was pardoned by the state of Georgia in 1986.)

In 1945, Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta proclaimed independence for Indonesia, setting off the Indonesian National Revolution against Dutch rule.

In 1945, the George Orwell novel “Animal Farm,” an allegorical satire of Soviet Communism, was first published in London by Martin Secker & Warburg.

In 1959, trumpeter Miles Davis released “Kind of Blue,” regarded as one of the most influential jazz albums of all time.

In 1978, the first successful trans-Atlantic balloon flight ended as Maxie Anderson, Ben Abruzzo and Larry Newman landed their Double Eagle II outside Paris.

In 1988, Pakistani President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq and U.S. Ambassador Arnold Raphel were killed in a mysterious plane crash.

In 1999, more than 17,000 people were killed when a magnitude 7.4 earthquake struck the Kocaeli Province of Turkey.

—From AP reports