BonBagay.com::On This Day

1809 Composer Franz Joseph Haydn died in Vienna, Austria.

1819 Poet Walt Whitman was born in West Hill, N.Y.

1910 The Union of South Africa was founded.

1913 The 17th Amendment to the Constitution, providing for the popular election of U.S. senators, was declared in effect.

1916 British and German fleets fought the Battle of Jutland off Denmark during World War I.

1961 South Africa became an independent republic.

1962 Gestapo official Adolf Eichmann was hanged in Israel for his role in the Holocaust.

1970 An earthquake in Peru killed tens of thousands of people.

1977 The trans-Alaska oil pipeline was completed after three years of work.

1989 House Speaker Jim Wright, D-Texas, dogged by questions about his ethics, announced he would resign.

1991 Leaders of Angola's two warring factions signed a peace treaty, ending a 16-year civil war.

1994 The United States announced it was no longer aiming long-range nuclear missiles at targets in the former Soviet Union.

2003 Bombing suspect Eric Rudolph was arrested outside a grocery store in Murphy, N.C. (He later pleaded guilty to four bombings - including those at a Birmingham. Ala., abortion clinic and at the Atlanta Olympics - and was sentenced to four life terms.)

2005 Former FBI official W. Mark Felt stepped forward as "Deep Throat," the secret Washington Post source that helped bring down President Richard M. Nixon during the Watergate scandal.

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