On This Date in History

On this date in:


1793 French revolutionary writer Jean Paul Marat was stabbed to death in his bath by Charlotte Corday, who was executed four days later.


1863 Rioting against the Civil War military draft erupted in New York City; about 1,000 people died over three days.


1960 John F. Kennedy won the Democratic presidential nomination at the party's convention in Los Angeles.


1967 Race-related rioting broke out in Newark, N.J.; 27 people died in four days of violence.


1978 Lee Iacocca was fired as president of Ford Motor Co.


1985 Live Aid, a concert to raise money for Africa's starving people, was held in London, Philadelphia, Moscow and Sydney, Australia.


1985 The Constitution's presidential disability clause was invoked for the first time as President Ronald Reagan transferred power temporarily to Vice President George H.W. Bush before undergoing surgery for colon cancer.


1998 A jury in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., ruled that the Rev. Al Sharpton and two others had defamed a former prosecutor by accusing him of raping Tawana Brawley.


2005 Former WorldCom Inc. boss Bernard Ebbers was sentenced to 25 years in prison for leading the largest corporate fraud in U.S. history.


2007 Former media mogul Conrad Black was convicted of swindling the newspaper empire he once ran out of millions of dollars. (He is serving a 6 1/2-year sentence at a federal prison in Florida.)