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ment.
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• On this date:
• In 1776, the first scholastic fraternity in America, Phi Beta Kappa, was organized at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va.
• In 1782, the eighth president of the United States, Martin Van Buren, was born in Kinderhook, N.Y.; he was the first chief executive to be born after American independence.
• In 1791, composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in Vienna, Austria, at age 35.
• In 1792, George Washington was re-elected president; John Adams was re-elected vice president.
• In 1831, former President John Quincy Adams took his seat as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.
• In 1848, President James K. Polk triggered the Gold Rush of '49 by confirming that gold had been discovered in California.
• In 1932, German physicist Albert Einstein was granted a visa, making it possible for him to travel to the United States.
• In 1955, the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations merged to form the AFL-CIO under its first president, George Meany.
• In 1979, feminist Sonia Johnson was formally excommunicated by the Mormon Church because of her outspoken support for the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution.
• In 1991, Richard Speck, who'd murdered eight student nurses in Chicago in 1966, died in prison a day short of his 50th birthday.
• In 1994, Republicans chose Newt Gingrich to be the first GOP speaker of the House in four decades.
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• Ten years ago: The two makers of flu shots in the United States, Chiron and Aventis Pasteur, announced they had run out of vaccine and would not be able to meet a surge in demand. A suicide bombing on a commuter train in southern Russia killed 44 people, two days before the nation's parliamentary elections. Six children were killed during an assault by U.S. forces on a compound in eastern Afghanistan. A federal judge in Utah threw out the case against two civic leaders accused of bribery in their efforts to bring the 2002 Winter Games to Salt Lake City.
• Five years ago: The Labor Department reported that an alarming half-million jobs had vanished in Nov. 2008 as unemployment hit a 15-year high of 6.7 percent. A judge in Las Vegas sentenced O.J. Simpson to 33 years in prison (with eligibility

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