On Aug. 11, 1860, the nation’s first successful silver mill began operation near Virginia City, Nev.
In 1909 what is believed to be the first radio SOS sent by an American ship was transmitted from the liner Arapahoe after its engines were disabled off Cape Hatteras, N.C.
In 1919 industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie died in Lenox, Mass.; he was 84.
In 1921 writer Alex Haley, who chronicled the African-American experience with works such as “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” and “Roots,” was born in Ithaca, N.Y.
In 1933 Jerry Falwell, the Baptist preacher who founded the Moral Majority, was born in Lynchburg, Va.
In 1942, during World War II, Vichy government official Pierre Laval publicly declared that “the hour of liberation for France is the hour when Germany wins the war.”
In 1956 abstract painter Jackson Pollock died in an automobile crash in East Hampton, N.Y.; he was 44.
In 1965 rioting and looting broke out in the predominantly African-American Watts section of Los Angeles; 34 people were killed in the violence.
In 1984 President Ronald Reagan joked during a voice test for a paid political radio address that he had “signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”
In 1992 the Mall of America, the biggest U.S. shopping mall, opened in Bloomington, Minn.
In 1994 a federal jury awarded $286.8 million to 10,000 commercial fishermen for losses as a result of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill.
In 2003 Herb Brooks, who coached the U.S. Olympic Olympic hockey team to the “Miracle on Ice” victory over the Soviet Union in 1980, died in a car crash near Minneapolis; he was 66.
