1981: President Ronald Reagan is shot and seriously injured outside a Washington, D.C., hotel by John W. Hinckley, Jr.; White House press secretary James Brady, Secret Service agent Timothy McCarthy and a District of Columbia police officer, Thomas Delahanty, are also injured.
Also on this day:
1822: Florida becomes a U.S. territory.1867: U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward reaches agreement with Russia to purchase the territory of Alaska for $7.2 million, a deal ridiculed by critics as “Seward’s Folly.”
1923: The Cunard liner RMS Laconia becomes the first passenger ship to circle the globe as it arrives in New York.
1970: Triple Crown winner Secretariat is born at The Meadow near Doswell, Va.
1991: Patricia Bowman of Jupiter, Fla., tells authorities she was raped hours earlier by William Kennedy Smith, the nephew of Sen. Edward Kennedy, at the family’s Palm Beach estate.
2002: Britain’s Queen Mother Elizabeth, 101, dies at Royal Lodge, Windsor, outside London.
2004: In a reversal, President George W. agrees to let National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice testify publicly and under oath before an independent panel investigating the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
2006: American reporter Jill Carroll, a freelancer for The Christian Science Monitor, is released after 82 days as a hostage in Iraq.
2009: President Barack Obama asserts unprecedented government control over the auto industry, rejecting turnaround plans from General Motors and Chrysler and raising the prospect of controlled bankruptcy for either ailing auto giant.
2009: Federal food safety officials warn consumers to stop eating all foods containing pistachios while they figure out the source of a possible salmonella contamination
2017: North Carolina rolls back its “bathroom bill” in a bid to end a yearlong backlash over transgender rights that cost the state in business projects, conventions and basketball tournaments.
2017: At Cape Canaveral, SpaceX successfully launches and then retrieves its first recycled rocket. 2018: The widow of the gunman who slaughtered 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., is acquitted on charges that she helped plot the attack and lied to the FBI afterward.
