Today's Highlight in History:
On Sept. 6, 1901, President William McKinley was shot and mortally wounded by anarchist Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, N.Y. McKinley died eight days later; he was succeeded by Vice President Theodore Roosevelt. (Czolgosz was executed in October 1901.)
On this date:
In 1757, the Marquis de Lafayette, the French hero of the American Revolution, was born in Auvergne, France.
In 1837, the Oberlin Collegiate Institute of Ohio went co-educational.
In 1909, American explorer Robert Peary sent word that he had reached the North Pole five months earlier.
In 1939, the Union of South Africa declared war on Germany.
In 1944, during World War II, the British government relaxed blackout restrictions and suspended compulsory training for the Home Guard.
In 1948, former Princess Juliana of the Netherlands was inaugurated as queen, two days after the abdication of her mother, Queen Wilhelmina.
In 1958, Miss Mississippi Mary Ann Mobley was crowned Miss America 1959 in Atlantic City, N.J.
In 1966, South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd was stabbed to death by an apparently deranged page during a parliamentary session in Cape Town.
In 1970, Palestinian guerrillas seized control of three jetliners which were later blown up on the ground in Jordan after the passengers and crews were evacuated.
In 1978, James Wickwire of Seattle and Louis Reichardt of San Francisco became the first Americans to reach the summit of Pakistan's K2, the world's second-highest mountain (after Mount Everest).
Ten years ago: Divers working off Nova Scotia found the flight data recorder from Swissair Flight 111, which had crashed, killing all 229 people on board. (However, it turned out the recorder had stopped working several minutes before the crash.) Japanese movie director Akira Kurosawa died in Tokyo at age 88.
