Today In History...

In 1530 Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, onetime advisor to England's King Henry VIII, dies.
In 1864 The Colorado militia killed 150 peaceful Cheyenne Indians in what became known as the "Sand Creek Massacre."
In 1877 Edison made the first sound recording: "Mary Had a Little Lamb."
In 1887 The U.S. received rights to Pearl Harbor on Oahu, Hawaii.
In 1890 The first Army-Navy football game was played, at West Point, New York. Navy defeats Army, 24-0.
In 1897 The first oval-track motorcycle races were run in Surrey, England.
In 1929 Navy Lt. Commander Richard E. Byrd radios to say that he had made the first airplane flight over the South Pole.
In 1934 Chicago beat Detroit in the first nationally broadcast NFL game.
In 1945 The monarchy was abolished in Yugoslavia, and a republic was proclaimed.
In 1947 The U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the partitioning of Palestine between Arabs and Jews.
In 1951 First underground atomic explosion occurred at Frenchman Flat, Nevada.
In 1952 President-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower kept a campaign promise and visited Korea to assess the war.
In 1953 America's first non-stop transcontinental passenger service was launched by American Airlines.
In 1961 "Enos" the chimp is launched aboard Mercury V which orbits the earth twice and lands off Puerto Rico.
In 1963 President Lyndon Johnson named a commission headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren to investigate the assassination of President Kennedy.
In 1964 The Roman Catholic Church in the U.S. instituted sweeping changes in the liturgy, including the use of English instead of Latin.
In 1967 Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara announced he would leave the Johnson administration to become president of the World Bank.
In 1971 The first Professional Golf Championship was held at Walt Disney World in Orlando.
In 1975 The Kilauea Volcano erupted in Hawaii.
In 1975 Red River, New Mexico, set a 24-hour snowfall record at 34 inches.
In 1981 Actress Natalie Wood drowned in a boating accident off Santa Catalina, CA, at age 43.
In 1982 The U.N. General Assembly renewed its demand that the Soviet Union withdraw its troops from Afghanistan.
In 1985 Two spacewalking astronauts from the shuttle Atlantis assembled a 45-foot beam and a pyramid-shaped structure in a test of techniques that might be used in future space construction.
In 1986 Actor Cary Grant died in Davenport, Iowa, where he had scheduled a public appearance, at age 82.
In 1987 A Korean Air jetliner disappeared off Burma with the loss of all 115 people aboard.
In 1988 Senate Democrats elected George Mitchell of Maine to be majority leader, the post vacated by Robert Byrd of West Virginia.
In 1988 The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the rights of criminal defendants are not violated when police unintentionally fail to preserve potentially vital evidence.
In 1989 Czechoslovakia ended 41 years of one-party Communist rule.
In 1990 The U.N. Security Council, led by the U.S., voted, 12-2, to authorize military action if Iraq did not withdraw its troops from Kuwait and release all foreign hostages by January 15, 1991.
In 1991 Seventeen people were killed in a 164-vehicle pileup during a dust storm on Interstate 5 near Coalinga, California.
In 1991 Actor Ralph Bellamy died in Santa Monica, CA, at age 87.
In 1994 Fighter jets attacked the capital of Chechnya hours after Russian President Boris Yeltsin ordered the breakaway republic to end its civil war within two days or face direct Russian intervention.
In 1995 President Clinton opened a 5-day European trip in London, where he met with Prime Minister John Major and addressed the British Parliament.
In 1996 A UN court sentenced a Bosnian Serb army soldier, Drazen Erdemovic, to 10 years in prison for his role in the massacre of 1,200 Muslims.
In 1996 John C. Salvi III, serving a life sentence for fatally shooting two abortion clinic receptionists, hung himself in prison.
In 1997 Former Detroit Mayor Coleman A. Young, the city's first black mayor who held office for an unprecedented five terms, died at age 79.
In 1998 Swiss voters overwhelmingly rejected the legalization of heroin and other narcotics.
In 1999 Protestant and Catholic adversaries formed an extraordinary Northern Ireland government designed to bring together every branch of opinion within the bitterly divided society.
In 2000 The European Union proposed new measures to try and eradicate mad cow disease and stem public health scare over beef.
In 2000 Lou Groza, the Cleveland Browns' Hall of Fame kicker and lineman known as "The Toe," died at age 76.
In 2003 Thirty-three were killed in the crash of a military plane in Congo.
In 2004 The U.S Supreme Court rejected a challenge to a gay-marriage law in Massachusetts.