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• On this date:
• In 1540, King Henry VIII's chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, was executed, the same day Henry married his fifth wife, Catherine Howard.
• In 1609, the English ship Sea Venture, commanded by Adm. Sir George Somers, ran ashore on Bermuda, where the passengers and crew founded a colony.
• In 1794, Maximilien Robespierre, a leading figure of the French Revolution, was sent to the guillotine.
• In 1821, Peru declared its independence from Spain.
• In 1914, World War I began as Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia.
• In 1928, the Summer Olympic games opened in Amsterdam.
• In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced the end of coffee rationing, which had limited people to one pound of coffee every five weeks since it began in Nov. 1942.
• In 1945, a U.S. Army bomber crashed into the 79th floor of New York's Empire State Building, killing 14 people. The U.S. Senate ratified the United Nations Charter by a vote of 89-2.
• In 1959, in preparation for statehood, Hawaiians voted to send the first Chinese-American, Republican Hiram L. Fong, to the U.S. Senate and the first Japanese-American, Democrat Daniel K. Inouye, to the U.S. House of Representatives.
• In 1962, 19 passengers were killed when a Pennsylvania Railroad Co. train enroute from Harrisburg to Philadelphia derailed in Steelton.
• In 1976, an earthquake devastated northern China, killing at least 242,000 peo (Continued on page 35)
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