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• On this date:
• In 1777, Gen. George Washington's troops launched an assault on the British at Germantown, Pa., resulting in heavy American casualties.
• In 1822, the 19th president of the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes, was born in Delaware, Ohio.
• In 1861, during the Civil War, the United States Navy authorized construction of the first ironclad ship, the USS Monitor.
• In 1887, the International Herald Tribune had its beginnings as the Paris Herald, a European edition of the New York Herald.
• In 1931, the comic strip "Dick Tracy," created by Chester Gould, made its debut.
• In 1940, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini conferred at Brenner Pass in the Alps.
• In 1959, the Soviet Union launched Luna 3, a space probe which transmitted images of the far side of the moon.
• In 1960, an Eastern Air Lines Lockheed L-188A Electra crashed on takeoff from Boston's Logan International Airport, killing all but 10 of the 72 people on board.
• In 1970, rock singer Janis Joplin, 27, was found dead in her Hollywood hotel room.
• In 1976, agriculture secretary Earl Butz resigned in the wake of a controversy over a joke he'd made about blacks.
• In 1980, fire broke out aboard the Dutch cruise vessel Prinsendam in the Gulf of Alaska, forcing the 520 people aboard to abandon ship; no deaths or serious injury resulted. (The ship capsized and sank a week later.)
• In 1991, 26 nations, including the United States, signed the Madrid Protocol, which imposed a 50-year ban on oil exploration and mining in Antarctica.
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• Ten years ago: John Walker Lindh, the so-called "American Taliban," received a 20-year sentence after a sobbing, halting plea for forgiveness before a federal judge in Alexandria, Va.. In a federal court in Boston, a laughing Richard Reid pleaded guilty to trying to blow up a trans-Atlantic flight with explosives hidden in his shoes as he declared his hatred for America and his loyalty to Osama bin Laden.
• Five years ago: Sen. Larry Craig, R-Idaho, defiantly vowed to serve out his term in office despite losing a court attempt to rescind his guilty plea in a men's room sex sting. Former city maintenance worker John Ashley shot five people in a law office in Alexandria, La., killing two of them; Ashley was shot and killed by police following a standoff. South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun and North Korean leader Kim Jong Il pledged to pursue a peace treaty and end their countries' decades-long standoff.

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