The US issues the first War Bonds. By the end of 1811, the United States government had tired of seeing the nation’s merchant ships suffer at the hands of the British and French.

1923 – President Harding became the first chief executive to file an income tax report.

1947 – Ensign John W. Lee becomes first African American officer commissioned in regular Navy. He was assigned to USS Kearsage.

1964 – Jack Ruby, the Dallas nightclub owner who killed Lee Harvey Oswald–the accused assassin of President John F. Kennedy– is found guilty of the “murder with malice” of Oswald and sentenced to die in the electric chair.

1966 – Establishment of River Squadron Five in Vietnam.

1967 – The body of President Kennedy was moved from a temporary grave to a permanent memorial site at Arlington National Cemetery.

1995 – American astronaut Norman Thagard became the first American to enter space aboard a Russian rocket as he and two cosmonauts blasted off aboard a Soyuz spacecraft, headed for the Mir space station.

1997 – Operation Gulf Shield begins. This operation is a counterpart to the counter narcotics operation Frontier Shield.

1999 – The Clinton administration conceded the Chinese had gained from technology allegedly stolen from a federal nuclear weapons lab but insisted the government responded decisively; Republicans demanded a comprehensive review of U.S. policy toward China.

2003 – Christopher Boyce, whose Cold War spying was immortalized on film in “The Falcon and the Snowman,” was released from a halfway house in San Francisco after about a quartercentury in prison.