| On this date in: |
| 1819 |
Spain ceded Florida to the United States. |
| 1862 |
Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as president of the Confederacy. |
| 1865 |
Tennessee adopted a new constitution abolishing slavery. |
| 1879 |
Frank Winfield Woolworth opened a five-cent store in Utica, N.Y. |
| 1924 |
Calvin Coolidge delivered the first presidential radio broadcast from the White House. |
| 1932 |
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., was born in Boston, the youngest child of Joseph P. and Rose Kennedy. |
| 1935 |
It became illegal for airplanes to fly over the White House. |
| 1959 |
The inaugural Daytona 500 race was held in Daytona Beach, Fla. |
| 1980 |
The U.S. hockey team beat the Soviets 4-3 In a stunning upset at the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, N.Y.
 |
ABC announcer Al Michaels calls the final seconds of the game. |
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| AP Photo |
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| 2001 |
A U.N. war crimes tribunal convicted three Bosnian Serbs on charges of rape and torture in the first case of wartime sexual enslavement to go before an international court. |
| 2006 |
Insurgents destroyed the golden dome of one of Iraq’s holiest Shiite shrines, the Askariya mosque in Samarra, setting off a spasm of sectarian violence. |
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| AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed |
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| 2011 |
A magnitude-6.1 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, killed 184 people. |
| 2011 |
Somali pirates shot to death four Americans taken hostage on their yacht several hundred miles south of Oman. |
