Today in History

Carnegie Hall in New York begins $20 million in renovations.

Young people protest having to cut their long hair in Athens, Greece.

North Vietnamese army chief in Hue orders all looters to be shot on sight.

Ranger 8 hits the moon and sends back 7,000 photos to the United States.

Moscow offers to allow on-site inspection of nuclear testing.

Mercury astronaut John Glenn becomes the first American to orbit the Earth.

The FCC applies the equal time rule to TV newscasts of political candidates.

The Ford Foundation gives a $25 million grant to the Fund for Advancement of Education.

German troops of the Afrika Korps break through the Kasserine Pass, defeating U.S. forces.

Lt. Edward O’Hare downs five out of nine Japanese bombers that are attacking the carrier Lexington.

The United States sends war planes to the Pacific.

Hitler demands self-determination for Germans in Austria and Czechoslovakia.

Sidney Poitier, American actor, first African American male to win an Oscar (Lillies of the Field).

Robert Altman, film director (Nashville, The Player).

Gloria Vanderbilt, fashion designer

The Soviet Red Army seizes Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine.

President Woodrow Wilson opens the Panama-Pacific Expo in San Francisco to celebrate the opening of the Panama Canal.

Russian troops seize large portions of Mongolia.

Aleksey Nikolayevich Kosygin, Premier of the Soviet Union (1964-1980).

Ansel Adams, American landscape photographer, especially of western wilderness and mountain panoramas.

Louis I. Kahn, architect.

J.F. Pickering patents his airship.

Jimmy Yancey, American blues pianist.

Curt Richter, biologist.

Marie Rambert, ballet dancer and director.

Confederate troops defeat a Union army sent to bring Florida into the union at the Battle of Olustee, Fla.

Ludwig Boltzmann, atomic physics engineer

Polish revolutionaries defeat the Russians in the Battle of Grochow.

The U.S. Supreme Court rules that the power of the federal government is greater than any individual state in the Union.

Honore Daumier, French caricaturist.

The U.S. Postal Service is created.

William Prescott, U.S. Revolutionary War hero at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

New Hampshire militiamen partake in the first recorded scalping of Indians by whites in North America.

Pope Julius II dies. He will lay in rest in a huge tomb sculptured by Michelangelo.