Today is Monday, Feb. 4, the 35th day of 2019. There are 330 days left in the year.
Today's Highlight in History:
On Feb. 4, 1974, newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst, 19, was kidnapped in Berkeley, California, by the radical Symbionese Liberation Army.
On this date:
In 1783, Britain's King George III proclaimed a formal cessation of hostilities in the American Revolutionary War.
In 1789, electors chose George Washington to be the first president of the United States.
In 1861, delegates from six southern states that had recently seceded from the Union met in Montgomery, Alabama, to form the Confederate States of America.
In 1913, Rosa Parks, a black woman whose 1955 refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., city bus to a white man sparked a civil rights revolution, was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee.
In 1938, the Thornton Wilder play "Our Town" opened on Broadway. Walt Disney's animated feature "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" opened in general U.S. release.
In 1944, the Bronze Star Medal, honoring "heroic or meritorious achievement or service," was authorized by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
In 1962, a rare conjunction of the sun, the moon, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn occurred.
In 1983, pop singer-musician Karen Carpenter died in Downey, California, at age 32.
In 1987, pianist Liberace died at his Palm Springs, California, home at age 67.
In 1997, a civil jury in Santa Monica, California, found O.J. Simpson liable for the deaths of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman.
In 1999, Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant, was shot and killed in front of his Bronx home by four plainclothes New York City police officers. (The officers were acquitted at trial.)
In 2004, the Massachusetts high court declared that gay couples were entitled to nothing less than marriage, and that Vermont-style civil unions would not suffice. The social networking website Facebook had its beginnings as Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg launched "Thefacebook."