Today in History, December 13, 2003: Saddam Hussein captured by U.S. forces

Today is Dec. 13. On this date:

1642

Dutch navigator Abel Tasman sighted present-day New Zealand.

1769

Dartmouth College in New Hampshire received its charter.

1862

Union forces led by Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside launched futile attacks against entrenched Confederate soldiers during the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg; the soundly defeated Northern troops withdrew two days later.

1918

President Woodrow Wilson arrived in France, becoming the first chief executive to visit Europe while in office.

1928

George Gershwin’s “An American in Paris” had its premiere at Carnegie Hall in New York.

1937

The Chinese city of Nanjing fell to Japanese forces during the Sino-Japanese War; what followed was a massacre of war prisoners, soldiers and citizens. (China maintains that up to 300,000 people were killed; Japanese nationalists say the death toll was far lower, and some maintain the massacre never happened.)

1944

During World War II, the USS Nashville was badly damaged in a Japanese kamikaze attack off Negros Island in the Philippines that claimed 133 lives.

1974

Malta became a republic.

1974

Former Beatle George Harrison visited the White House, where he met President Gerald R. Ford.

1977

An Air Indiana Flight 216, a DC-3 carrying the University of Evansville basketball team on a flight to Nashville, crashed shortly after takeoff, killing all 29 people on board.

1978

The Philadelphia Mint began stamping the Susan B. Anthony dollar, which went into circulation the following July.

1981

Authorities in Poland imposed martial law in a crackdown on the Solidarity labor movement. (Martial law formally ended in 1983.)

1994

An American Eagle commuter plane crashed short of Raleigh-Durham International Airport in North Carolina, killing 15 of the 20 people on board.

1996

The U.N. Security Council chose Kofi Annan of Ghana to become the world body’s seventh secretary-general.

2000

Republican George W. Bush claimed the presidency a day after the U.S. Supreme Court shut down further recounts of disputed ballots in Florida; Democrat Al Gore conceded, delivering a call for national unity.

2002

Cardinal Bernard Law resigned as Boston archbishop because of the priest sex abuse scandal.

2003

Saddam Hussein was captured by U.S. forces while hiding in a hole under a farmhouse in Adwar, Iraq.