On this date in

668 Byzantine emperor Constans II was assassinated in his bath.

1254 Marco Polo was born.

1789 The U.S. Department of Foreign Affairs became the Department of State; novelist James Fenimore Cooper was born.

1830 William Huskisson, while attending the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester, was strucy by a locomotive, becoming the first person in history to be fatally injured in a railroad accident; former Mexican president Porfirio Diaz was born.

1857 William Howard Taft, the only person in American history to serve as President and chief justice of the Supreme Court, was born.

1876 Newspaper publisher Frank Gannett was born.

1889 Humorist Robert Benchley was born.

1890 Detective novelist Dame Agatha Christie was born.

1894 Film director Jean Renoir was born.

1903 Country singer-songwriter Roy Acuff was born.

1907 Actress Fay Wray was born.

1916 Actress Margaret Lockwood was born.

1918 Comedian Nipsey Russell was born.

1924 Musician Bobby Short was born.

1928 Jazz saxophonist Cannonball Adderley was born.

1935 The Nuremberg Laws, which, among other things, deprived German Jews of their citizenship and made the swastika the official symbol of Nazi Germany, went into effect.

1947 The Army Air Corps was separated from the Army to become a separate military branch.

1950 U.N. forces landed at Inchon and began driving toward Seoul during the Korean War.

1961 Hurricane Carla struck Texas.

1963 Four black girls in the bombing of a Baptist church in Birmingham, Ala.

1981 Sandra Day O'Connor is approved as the first female justice on the Supreme Court.