Today in History

Mexico devalues the peso by 30 percent to fight an economic slide.

Randolph Hearst is to give $2 million in free food for the poor in order to open talks for his daughter Patty.

The California Supreme Court voids the death penalty.

Three U.S. pilots that were held by the Vietnamese arrive in Washington.

The National Art Gallery in Washington agrees to buy a Da Vinci for a record $5 million.

The United States cuts military aid to five nations in reprisal for having trade relations with Cuba.

Robert F. Kennedy says that U.S. troops will stay in Vietnam until Communism is defeated.

East and West Berlin drop thousands of propaganda leaflets on each other after the end of a month long truce.

U.S. Marines storm ashore at Iwo Jima.

The U.S. Army and Marines invade Eniwetok Atoll in the Pacific.

German General Erwin Rommel takes three towns in Tunisia, North Africa.

The Golden Gate Exposition opens in San Francisco.

Rome reports sending troops to Italian Somalia.

Audre Lord, poet.

Manchurian independence is formally declared.

Toni Morrison, Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author (The Bluest Eye, Beloved).

Len Deighton, English spy writer (The Ipcress File).

Helen Gurley Brown, editor of Cosmopolitan magazine.

Vuillemin and Chalus complete their first flight over the Sahara Desert.

Wallace Stegner, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist (Angle of Repose).

600,000 tons of grain are sent to Russia to relieve the famine there.

Wendell Wilkie, Presidential candidate against President Franklin Roosevelt.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, is published in New York.

The bitter and bloody Lincoln County War begins with the murder of Billy the Kid‘s mentor, Englishman rancher John Tunstall.

Union troops force the Confederates to abandon Fort Anderson, N.C.

Charles M. Schwab, “Boy Wonder” of the steel industry. President of both U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel.

Jefferson F. Davis is inaugurated as the Confederacy‘s provisional president at a ceremony held in Montgomery, Ala.

Shalom Aleichem, Yiddish author.

Louis Comfort Tiffany, glassware artist and designer.

Czar Alexander enters Warsaw at the head of his Army.

George Peabody, U.S. merchant and philanthropist.

Quakers in Germantown, Pa. adopt the first formal antislavery resolution in America.

Queen Mary I, also known as Bloody Mary for her persecution of Protestants.

George, the Duke of Clarence, who had opposed his brother Edward IV, is murdered in the Tower of London.