By The Associated Press

Today in History

Today is Thursday, Feb. 4, the 35th day of 2021. There are 330 days left in the year.

Todayís Highlight in History:

On Feb. 4, 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin began a wartime conference at Yalta.

On this date:

In 1783, Britainís 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 1944, the Bronze Star Medal, honoring ìheroic or meritorious achievement or service,î was authorized by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In 1962, St. Jude Childrenís Research Hospital was founded in Memphis, Tennessee, by entertainer Danny Thomas.

In 1974, newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst, 19, was kidnapped in Berkeley, California, by the radical Symbionese Liberation Army.

In 1976, more than 23,000 people died when a severe earthquake struck Guatemala with a magnitude of 7.5, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

In 1983, pop singer-musician Karen Carpenter died in Downey, California, at age 32.

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.