Today's Highlight in History:
On July 7, 1865, four people were hanged in Washington for conspiring with John Wilkes Booth to assassinate President Lincoln.
On this date:
In 1807, Napoleon I of France and Czar Alexander I of Russia signed a treaty at Tilsit ending war between their empires.
In 1896, the Democratic national convention opened in Chicago.
In 1898, the United States annexed Hawaii.
In 1907, 100 years ago, science-fiction author Robert Heinlein was born in Butler, Miss.
In 1930, construction began on Boulder Dam (later Hoover Dam).
In 1946, Italian-born Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini was canonized as the first American saint by Pope Pius XII.
In 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Alaska statehood bill. (Alaska became the 49th state in January 1959.)
In 1981, President Reagan announced he was nominating Arizona Judge Sandra Day O'Connor to become the first female justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 1987, Lt. Col. Oliver North began his long-awaited public testimony at the Iran-Contra hearing, telling Congress that he had "never carried out a single act, not one," without authorization.
In 2005, suicide terrorist bombings in three Underground stations and a double-decker bus killed 52 victims and four bombers in the worst attack on London since World War II.
Ten years ago: Three days after landing on Mars, the Pathfinder spacecraft yielded what scientists said was unmistakable photographic evidence that colossal floods had scoured the planet's now-barren landscape more than a billion years ago.
