In 1954, four Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire from the spectators' gallery of the U.S. House of Representatives, wounding five members of Congress. The United States detonated a dry-fuel hydrogen bomb, codenamed Castle Bravo, at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order establishing the Peace Corps.
In 1971, a bomb went off inside a men's room at the U.S. Capitol; the radical group Weather Underground claimed responsibility for the pre-dawn blast.
In 1981, Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands began a hunger strike at the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland; he died 65 days later.
Ten years ago: Dennis Rader, the churchgoing family man accused of leading a double life as the BTK serial killer, was charged in Wichita, Kansas, with 10 counts of first-degree murder. (Rader later pleaded guilty and received multiple life sentences.) A closely divided Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty for juvenile criminals.
Five years ago: Wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic (RA'-doh-van KA'-ra-jich), defending himself against charges of Europe's worst genocide since the Holocaust, told judges in his slow-moving trial that he was not the barbarian depicted by U.N. prosecutors, but was protecting his people against a fundamentalist Muslim plot. Jay Leno returned as host of NBC's "The Tonight Show."