Today's Highlight in History:
On Oct. 4, 1957, the Space Age began as the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, into orbit.
On this date:
In 1777, George Washington's troops launched an assault on the British at Germantown, Pa., resulting in heavy American casualties.
In 1822, Rutherford B. Hayes, the 19th president of the United States, was born in Delaware, Ohio.
In 1940, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini conferred at Brenner Pass in the Alps.
In 1957, Jimmy Hoffa was elected president of the Teamsters Union.
In 1958, the first trans-Atlantic passenger jetliner service was begun by the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) with flights between London and New York.
In 1965, Pope Paul VI became the first pope to visit the Western Hemisphere as he addressed the U.N. General Assembly.
In 1970, rock singer Janis Joplin, 27, was found dead in her Hollywood, Calif., hotel room.
In 1976, agriculture secretary Earl Butz resigned in the wake of a controversy over a joke he'd made about blacks.
In 1978, a funeral mass was held at the Vatican for Pope John Paul I.
In 1980, some 520 people were forced to abandon the cruise ship Prinsendam in the Gulf of Alaska after the Dutch luxury liner caught fire; no deaths or serious injury resulted. (The ship capsized and sank a week later.)
Ten years ago: Russian envoys warned Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic that NATO might launch airstrikes unless he took "decisive measures" to end the humanitarian crisis in the southern province of Kosovo. Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso won re-election.
