On this day in …
* 1858, in a speech in Springfield, Ill., Senate candidate Abraham Lincoln said the slavery issue had to be resolved, declaring, "A house divided against itself cannot stand."
* 1897, the government signed a treaty of annexation with Hawaii
* 1917, Harry Miller completed the Golden Submarine, the first of his expensive custom-made race cars that would change the shape of things to come in American auto racing
* 1933, the National Industrial Recovery Act became law. (It was later struck down by the Supreme Court.)
* 1940, Marshal Henri-Philippe Petain, World War I hero, becomes prime minister of the Vichy government of France
* 1958, Imre Nagy, a former Hungarian premier and symbol of the nation's 1956 uprising against Soviet rule, is hanged for treason by his country's communist authorities
* 1961, following a meeting between President John F. Kennedy and South Vietnam envoy Nguyen Dinh Thuan, an agreement is reached for direct training and combat supervision of Vietnamese troops by U.S.
instructors. ALSO: Soviet ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev defected to the West while his troupe was in Paris
* 1963, the world's first female space traveler, Valentina Tereshkova, was launched into orbit by the Soviet Union aboard Vostok 6
* 1977, Leonid Ilich Brezhnev, first secretary of the Soviet Communist Party since 1964, is elected president of the Supreme Soviet, thereby becoming both head of party and head of state
* 1978, President Carter and Panamanian leader Omar Torrijos exchanged the instruments of ratification for the Panama Canal treaties
* 1996, Russian voters went to the polls in their first independent presidential election; the result was a runoff between President Boris Yeltsin (the eventual winner) and Communist challenger Gennady Zyugano
* 1998, Compaq breathed a sigh of relief on this day in 1998 as a Brooklyn jury tossed out a lawsuit filed against the computing giant and its recently acquired subsidiary, Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC).
The suit had been filed by a group of nine people who claimed that DEC's keyboards had caused them "repetitive stress injuries." In return for their pain, the nine plaintiffs had sought a tidy $10 million in damages
* 1999, Kathleen Anne Soliah, a former member of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), is arrested near her home in St. Paul, Minnesota. The small, radical American paramilitary group made a name for itself with a series of murders, robberies and other violent acts. They were most well-known for the 1974 kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst, who later became a member of the group.
Soliah, who now calls herself Sara Jane Olsen, had been evading authorities for more than 20 years
* 2001, face to face for the first time, President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin pledged during a meeting in Slovenia to deepen their nations' bonds and to explore the possibility of compromise on U.S. missile defense plans
* 2005, European Union leaders put on hold plans to unite their 25 nations under a single constitution
