Today In History

Today is Monday, October 3rd, the 276th day of 2011. There are 89 days left in the year.

Highlights in history on this date:

1226 - St. Francis of Assisi, founder of the Franciscan order, dies.

1789 - U.S. President George Washington proclaims the first national Thanksgiving Day; observed Nov. 26 in honor of the adoption of the U.S. Constitution.

1824 - A republican constitution is adopted in Mexico, until then an empire.

1866 - Italy and Austria sign a peace treaty in which Austria surrenders Venice and the surrounding region to Italy.

1899 - Settlement of British Guiana-Venezuela boundary dispute.

1922 - Rebecca L. Felton, a Democrat from Georgia becomes the first woman to be in the U.S. Senate. She was appointed to serve out the remaining term of Sen. Thomas E. Watson.

1929 - Name of Serbo-Croat-Slovene Kingdom is changed to Yugoslavia.

1932 - Iraq joins League of Nations as British mandate ends.

1935 - Italian forces invade Ethiopia.

1941 - Germany's Adolf Hitler announces the Soviet Union has been defeated and never will rise again.

1942 - President Franklin D. Roosevelt establishes the Office of Economic Stabilization and authorizes controls on farm prices, rents, wages and salaries.

1944 - U.S. troops crack the Siegfried Line north of Aachen, Germany, during World War II.

1945 - U.S. President Harry Truman warns Congress that "atomic force in ignorant or evil hands could inflict untold disaster upon the nation and the world."

1952 - British test their first atomic bomb off coast of Australia.

1954 - Foreign ministers of seven West European nations, the United States and Canada agree to allow West Germany to join the NATO.

1963 - The Honduran armed forces oust Ramon Villeda Morales as president in a violent coup d'etat.

1968 - Leftist military coup in Peru ousts President Fernando Balaunde Terry and imposes sweeping land reforms and nationalization.

1973 - The Austrian government curbs group transit of Soviet Jewish emigrants through Austria, and says it will close Israeli-run facilities that house emigrants awaiting transfer to Israel after hostages are taken by Arab guerillas.

1977 - India's former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is arrested in New Delhi on two charges of corruption while in office. She is released a day later.

1981 - Irish nationalists at the Maze Prison near Belfast, Northern Ireland, end seven months of hunger strikes that claimed 10 lives.

1990 - East and West Germany are united.

1991 - Shimon Peres, the head of Israel's opposition Labor Party, urges the government to freeze the construction of settlements in the occupied territories in order to expedite the U.S.-led effort to initiate Middle East peace talks.

1993 - At least 12 U.S. Army soldiers are killed in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, in a 15-hour battle with supporters of Somali warlord General Mohammed Farah Aidid.

1994 - Jordan and Israel sign peace agreement.

1995 - Former U.S. football star O.J. Simpson is acquitted of the 1994 slayings of his former wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ronald Goldman.

1996 - U.S. President Bill Clinton and the foreign ministers of Great Britain, China, France and Russia sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty forbidding all testing of nuclear weapons.

1997 - Earthquakes in central Italy injure 20 people and cause further damage to the Basilica of St. Francis of Assissi, damaged by earthquakes a week earlier.

1998 - 10,000 Turkish soldiers cross into northern Iraq to attack Kurdish rebels.

1999 - For the first time in postwar Austria, nationalist Joerg Haider's far-right Freedom Party wins second place in parliamentary elections, positioning him for negotiations on participating in the next government.

2000 - A Palestinian gunman fires on an Israeli outpost in the West Bank drawing return fire and disrupting a cease-fire the sides had hoped would end five days of bloodshed.

2003 - Pakistan successfully test-fires a nuclear capable Hatf-III missile with a range of 290 km (180 miles). The range is great enough to allow it to hit important Indian targets.

2004 - Two of Spain's most wanted alleged terrorists and at least 16 other suspected members of the armed Basque separatist group ETA are captured in a vast French-Spanish police operation.

2005 - Hundreds of Africans rush a security fence at the border between Morocco and a Spanish enclave, creating a surge in a recent wave of immigrants seeking a foothold in Europe.

2006 - A Turkish man hijacks a jetliner carrying 113 people from Albania to Istanbul on and forces it to land in southern Italy, where he surrenders and releases all the passengers unharmed.

2007 - About 3,000 miners are trapped underground when a water pipe bursts, probably causing a shaft to collapse in a South African gold mine.

2008 - U.S. enacts a historic $700 billion government bailout legislation for the battered financial industry.

2009 - Iran's president hits back at President Barack Obama's accusation that his country had sought to hide its construction of a new nuclear site, arguing that Tehran reported the facility to the U.N. even earlier than required.

2011 - Nigeria's federal police force name two men as the "masterminds" behind the bombings that struck the West African nation's capital of Abuja during its independence celebrations.

Today's Birthdays:

Charles Camille St. Saens, French composer (1835-1921); Pierre Bonnard, French painter (1867-1947); Gore Vidal, U.S. writer (1925--), Chubby Checker, U.S. singer (1941--), Tommy Lee, drummer formerly w/rock group Motley Crue (1962--).

Thought For Today:

Don't be humble; you're not that great — Golda Meir, Israeli prime minister (1898-1978).