TODAY IN HISTORY

1790: President George Washington signed into

law the first U.S. copyright act.

1859: The Big Ben clock tower in London went into

operation, chiming for the first time.

1889: Some 2,200 people in Johnstown, Penn., perished when the South Fork Dam collapsed, sending 20 million tons of water rushing through the town.

1921: A race riot erupted in Tulsa, Okla., as white mobs began looting and leveling the affluent Black district of Greenwood over reports a Black man had assaulted a white woman in an elevator; hundreds are believed to have died.

1949: Former State Department official and accused spy Alger Hiss went on trial in New York, charged with perjury (the jury deadlocked, but Hiss was convicted in a second trial).

1962: Former Nazi official Adolf Eichmann was hanged in Israel a few minutes before midnight for his role in the Holocaust.

1970: A magnitude 7.9 earthquake in Peru claimed an estimated 67,000 lives.

1977: The Trans-Alaska oil pipeline, three years in the making despite objections from environmentalists and Alaska Natives, was completed. (The first oil began flowing through the pipeline 20 days later.)

1989: House Speaker Jim Wright, dogged by questions about his ethics, announced he would resign. (Tom Foley later succeeded him.)

2009: Dr. George Tiller, a rare provider of lateterm abortions, was shot and killed in a Wichita, Kan., church. (Gunman Scott Roeder was later convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole for 50 years.) Millvina Dean, the last survivor of the 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic, died in Southampton, England at 97.

2013: A tornado in the Oklahoma City metro area claimed eight lives, including those of storm chasers Tim Samaras, his son, Paul, and Carl Young; 13 people died in flash flooding. Four firefighters searching for people in a blazing Houston motel and restaurant were killed when part of the structure collapsed. Actor Jean Stapleton, who played Archie Bunker’s far better half, the sweetly naive Edith, in TV’s groundbreaking 1970s comedy “All in the Family,” died in New York at age 90.