North Carolina became the 12th state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
1836 – Marines and Soldiers took action against the Seminole Indians at Wahoo Swamp, Florida.
1860 – The notorious hired killer Tom Horn is born on this day in 1860, in Memphis, Missouri. “Killing is my specialty,” Horn reportedly once said. “I look at it as a business proposition, and I think I have a corner on the market.”
1938 – Nazi forces occupied western Czechoslovakia and declared its people German citizens. This annexation of Sudetenland was the first major belligerent action by Hitler.
1944 – US 1st and 9th Armies meet firm resistance from German forces west of the Roer River. The US 3rd Army continues the siege of Metz while other elements gain ground near Saarebourg. Metz has never been taken by siege.1945- The last residents of the US Japanese-American internment left their camps.
1950 – The 17th Infantry Regiment of the 7th Infantry Division reached the Yalu River near its source at Hyesanjin, “Ghost City of Broken Bridges.” This was the northernmost progress achieved by any U.S. unit operating in the east under X Corps.
1967 – Gen. William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam, tells U.S. news reporters: “I am absolutely certain that whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing.”
1970 – A combined Air Force and Army team of 40 Americans–led by Army Colonel “Bull” Simons–conducts a raid on the Son Tay prison camp, 23 miles west of Hanoi, in an attempt to free between 70 and 100 Americans suspected of being held there.
1973 – President Nixon’s attorney, J. Fred Buzhardt, revealed the existence of an 18 1/2- minute gap in one of the White House tape recordings related to Watergate.
1986 – National Security Council member Oliver North and his secretary, Fawn Hall, begin shredding documents that would have exposed their participation in a range of activities regarding the sale of arms to Iran and the diversion of the proceeds to a rebel Nicaraguan group.
2014 – The United States House of Representatives files a lawsuit against President Barack Obama for executive actions undertaken in relation to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.
