Events, Births and Deaths Happening on this Date

1845

The U.S. Naval Academy opened in Annapolis, Md.

1886

The tuxedo dinner jacket made its American debut at the autumn ball in Tuxedo Park, N.Y.

1911

Revolutionaries under Sun Yat-sen overthrew China's Manchu dynasty.

1935

George Gershwin's opera ''Porgy and Bess'' opened on Broadway.

1938

Germany completed its annexation of Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland.

1943

Chiang Kai-shek took the oath of office as president of China.

1957

President Dwight D. Eisenhower apologized to Komla Agbeli Gbdemah, the finance minister of Ghana, after the official had been refused service in a Dover, Del., restaurant.

1970

Quebec Labor Minister Pierre Laporte was kidnapped by the Quebec Liberation Front, a militant separatist group. Laporte's body was found about a week later.

1970

Fiji became independent after nearly a century of British rule.

1973

Vice President Spiro T. Agnew pleaded no contest to one count of federal income tax evasion and resigned his office.

1978

President Carter signed a bill authorizing the $1 Susan B. Anthony coin.

1985

U.S. fighter jets forced an Egyptian plane carrying the hijackers of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro to land in Italy, where the gunmen were taken into custody.

1998

A New York judge awarded $185,000 in damages to a white former prosecutor who was falsely accused by advisers to Tawana Brawley of taking part in the alleged rape of the black woman.

1813

Composer Giuseppe Verdi was born in Le Roncole, Italy.

1985

Actor-director Orson Welles died in Los Angeles at age 70.

1985

Actor Yul Brynner died in New York at age 65.

1997

Michael J. S. Dewar, Indian-born American theoretical chemist who developed the Dewar-Chatt-Duncanson model (b. 1918)

1998

Former Defense Secretary and presidential adviser Clark M. Clifford died at age 91.

2015

Sybil Stockdale, American activist, co-founded the National League of Families (b. 1924)

2024

Ethel Kennedy, American human rights advocate. Kennedy was the wife of U.S. senator Robert F. Kennedy. After her husband's assassination in 1968, she founded the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. (b. 1928)