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• On this date:
• In 1792, highwayman Nicolas Jacques Pelletier became the first person under French law to be executed by the guillotine.
• In 1859, ground was broken for the Suez Canal.
• In 1862, during the Civil War, a Union fleet commanded by Flag Officer David G. Farragut captured the city of New Orleans.
• In 1898, the United States formally declared war on Spain.
• In 1901, New York Gov. Benjamin Barker Odell Jr. signed an automobile registration bill which imposed a 15 mph speed limit on highways.
• In 1915, during World War I, Allied soldiers invaded the Gallipoli (guh-LIHP'-uh-lee) Peninsula in an unsuccessful attempt to take the Ottoman Empire out of the war.
• In 1944, the United Negro College Fund was founded.
• In 1945, during World War II, U.S. and Soviet forces linked up on the Elbe (EL'-beh) River, a meeting that dramatized the collapse of Nazi Germany's defenses. Delegates from some 50 countries met in San Francisco to organize the United Nations.
• In 1959, the St. Lawrence Seaway opened to shipping.
• In 1964, vandals sawed off the head of the "Little Mermaid" statue in Copenhagen, Denmark.
• In 1974, the "Carnation Revolution" took place in Portugal as a bloodless military coup toppled the Estado Novo regime.
• In 1983, 10-year-old Samantha Smith of Manchester, Maine, received a reply from Soviet leader Yuri V. Andropov to a letter she'd written expressing concern about possible nuclear war; Andropov reassured Samantha that the Soviet Union did not want war, and he invited her to visit his country, a trip Samantha made in July.
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• Ten years ago: Hundreds of thousands of abortion-rights supporters marched in Washington, D.C. to protest Bush administration policies.
• Five years ago: In her first trip to Iraq as America's top diplomat, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton tried to reassure nervous Iraqis that the U.S. wouldn't abandon them, even as she said the American troop withdrawal would stay on schedule. Finance ministers meeting in Washington said they saw signs the global economy was stabilizing but cautioned it would take until the middle of next year for the world to emerge from the worst recession in decades. University of Georgia pro

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