Today in History

Today is Thursday, Jan. 18, the 18th day of 2024. There are 348 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History: On Jan. 18, 1778, English navigator Captain James Cook reached the present-day Hawaiian Islands, which he named the “Sandwich Islands.”

On this date:

In 1911, the first landing of an aircraft on a ship took place as pilot Eugene B. Ely brought his Curtiss biplane in for a safe landing on the deck of the armored cruiser USS Pennsylvania in San Francisco Harbor.

In 1913, entertainer Danny Kaye was born David Daniel Kaminsky in New York City.

In 1943, during World War II, Jewish insurgents in the Warsaw Ghetto launched their initial armed resistance against Nazi troops, who eventually succeeded in crushing the rebellion.

In 1975, the situation comedy “The Jeffersons,” a spin-off from “All in the Family,” premiered on CBS-TV.

In 1990, a jury in Los Angeles acquitted former preschool operators Raymond Buckey and his mother, Peggy McMartin Buckey, of 52 child molestation charges.

In 1991, financially strapped Eastern Airlines shut down after more than six decades in business.

In 1993, the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday was observed in all 50 states for the first time.

In 2005, the world’s largest commercial jet, the Airbus A380 “superjumbo” capable of flying up to 800 passengers, was unveiled in Toulouse, France.

In 2012, President Barack Obama rejected the Keystone XL project, a Canadian company’s plan to build a 1,700-mile pipeline to carry oil across six U.S. states to Texas refineries.

In 2013, former Democratic New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin was indicted on charges that he’d used his office for personal gain, accepting payoffs, free trips and gratuities from contractors while the city was struggling to recover from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. (Nagin was later convicted and released from prison in 2020.)

In 2019, Jason Van Dyke, the white Chicago police officer who gunned down Black teenager Laquan McDonald in 2014, was sentenced to nearly seven years in prison.

In 2020, ahead of opening statements in the first Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump, House prosecutors wrote that Trump had “used his official powers to pressure a foreign government to interfere in a United States election for his personal political gain,” while Trump’s legal team denounced what it called a “brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election.”

In 2023, a helicopter carrying Ukraine’s interior minister crashed into a kindergarten in a foggy residential suburb of Kyiv, killing him and about a dozen other people, including a child on the ground.

Today’s birthdays: Movie director John Boorman is 91. Former Sen. Paul Kirk, D-Mass., is 86. Singer-songwriter Bobby Goldsboro is 83. Comedian-singer-musician Brett Hudson is 71. Actor-director Kevin Costner is 69. Country singer-actor Mark Collie is 68. Actor Mark Rylance is 64. Actor Alison Arngrim (TV: “Little House on the Prairie”) is 62. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley is 61. Actor Jane Horrocks is 60. Comedian Dave Attell (uh-TEHL’) is 59. Actor Jesse L. Martin is 55. Rapper DJ Quik is 54. Rock singer Jonathan Davis (Korn) is 53. Former NAACP President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous is 51. Singer Christian Burns (BBMak) is 50. Actor Derek Richardson is 48. Actor Jason Segel is 44. Actor Samantha Mumba is 41. Country singer Kristy Lee Cook (TV: “American Idol”) is 40. Actor Devin Kelley is 38. Actor Ashleigh Murray (TV: “Riverdale”) is 36. Tennis player Angelique Kerber is 36. Actor Mateus Ward is 25.