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awarded the first Congressional Gold Medal by the Continental Congress.
• In 1865, during the Civil War, Confederate forces attacked Fort Stedman in Virginia but were forced to withdraw because of counterattacking Union troops.
• In 1894, Jacob S. Coxey began leading an "army" of unemployed from Massillon (MA'-sih-luhn), Ohio, to Washington D.C., to demand help from the federal government.
• In 1911, 146 people, mostly young female immigrants, were killed when fire broke out at the Triangle Shirtwaist Co. in New York.
• In 1924, the Second Hellenic Republic was proclaimed in Greece.
• In 1947, a coal mine explosion in Centralia, Ill., claimed 111 lives.
• In 1954, RCA announced it had begun producing color television sets at its plant in Bloomington, Ind. (The sets, with 12½-inch picture tubes, cost $1,000 each - roughly $8,700 in today's dollars.)
• In 1964, an acre of Runnymede in Surrey, England, was set aside by the British government as the site of a memorial to honor the late U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
• In 1975, King Faisal (FY'-suhl) of Saudi Arabia was shot to death by a nephew with a history of mental illness. (The nephew was beheaded in June 1975.)
• In 1988, in New York City's so-called "Preppie Killer" case, Robert Chambers Jr. pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter in the death of 18-year-old Jennifer Levin. (Chambers received a sentence of 5 to 15 years in prison; he was released in 2003.)
• In 1990, 87 people, most of them Honduran and Dominican immigrants, were killed when fire raced through an illegal social club in New York City.
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• Ten years ago: The Senate joined the House in passing the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, making it a separate offense to harm a fetus during a violent federal crime. The United States vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel's assassination of Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin (AKH'-mehd yah-SEEN'). Russian Evgeni Plushenko won his third world figure skating title, defeating French rival Brian Joubert in Dortmund, Germany.
• Five years ago: Pirates seized the Panama-registered, Greek-owned Nipayia with 18 Filipino crew members and a Russian captain off the Somali coastline. (The ship and crew were released in May 2009.) John Hope Franklin, a towering scholar of African-American studies, died in Durham, N.C. at age 94. Dan Seals, half of the pop duo England Dan and John Ford Coley, later a top country singer ("You Still Move Me"), died in Nashville at age 61.

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