YEARS AGO

Today is Monday, Aug. 17, the 229th day of 2015. There are 136 days left in the year.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

On this date in:

1807: Robert Fulton’s North River Steamboat begins heading up the Hudson River on its successful round trip between New York and Albany.

1863: Federal batteries and ships begin bombarding Fort Sumter in Charleston harbor during the Civil War, but the Confederates manage to hold on despite several days of pounding.

1943: The Allied conquest of Sicily during World War II is completed as U.S. and British forces enter Messina.

1945: Indonesian nationalists declare their independence from the Netherlands.

The George Orwell novel “Animal Farm,” an allegorical satire of Soviet Communism, is first published in London by Martin Secker & Warburg.

1915: A mob in Cobb County, Ga., lynched Jewish businessman Leo Frank, 31, whose death sentence for the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan had been commuted to life imprisonment. (Frank, who’d maintained his innocence, was pardoned by the state of Georgia in 1986.)

1962: East German border guards shoot and kill 18-year-old Peter Fechter, who had attempted to cross the Berlin Wall into the western sector.

1969: Hurricane Camille slams into the Mississippi coast as a Category 5 storm, It is blamed for 256 U.S. deaths and three in Cuba.

1978: The first successful trans-Atlantic balloon flight ends as Maxie Anderson, Ben Abruzzo and Larry Newman land their Double Eagle II outside Paris.

1985: More than 1,400 meatpackers walk off the jobs at the George A. Hormel and Co.’s main plant in Austin, Minn., in a bitter strike that lasted just over a year.

1987: Rudolf Hess, the last member of Adolf Hitler’s inner circle, dies at Spandau Prison at age 93, an apparent suicide.

1998: President Bill Clinton gives grand-jury testimony via closed-circuit television from the White House concerning his relationship with Monica Lewinsky; he then delivers a TV address in which he denies previously committing perjury, admits his relationship with Lewinsky was “wrong” and criticizes Kenneth Starr’s investigation.

2005: Israeli security forces pour into four Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip, beginning the forcible removal of protesters who’d refused orders to leave the area ahead of a deadline.

2010: A mistrial is declared on 23 corruption charges against ousted Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, who is accused of trying to sell President Barack Obama’s old Senate seat; the jury convicts him on one charge, that of lying to the FBI. (Blagojevich was convicted of 17 counts of corruption in a retrial and sentenced to 14 years in prison, but a federal appeals court dismissed five of the counts in July 2015.)

2014: U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder orders a federal medical examiner to perform another autopsy on the remains of Michael Brown, a black Missouri teenager whose fatal shooting by a white police officer has spurred a week of rancorous and sometimes violent protests in suburban St. Louis.

VINDICATOR FILES

1990: Poland Mayor Merle Madrid seeks reinstatement of the Mayor’s Court in the village, saying the shifting of jurisdiction to Struthers Municipal Court has affected police department morale and has caused a dangerous shortfall in village funds.

Tom Fair, former director of the United Steel Workers McDonald subdistrict, is hired as labor relations director of Warren Consolidated Industries.

The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency is urging cities that rely on the Ohio River for their water to investigate other supply sources and ways to treat and store water during emergencies.

1975: Sebring Village officials lift a police order that had closed the village’s five taverns and two private clubs after a barroom brawl that required 40 policemen to quell and resulted in the arrest of 18 people, including four 18-year-olds.

Arson investigators are convinced there is a “godfather” in the Youngstown area who calls the shots in most arsons that destroy financially troubled businesses.

Eighteen students from Mahoning, Trumbull and Columbiana high schools are chosen from 3,000 applicants for the 250-member Ohio Youth Choir. They are John Boquist, Nancy Pelini, Donna Vaclav, M. Delores Capel, Brad Hendricks, Carolyn Valentine, Dan Clifton, Brad McCrimmon, Jim Pitsenbarger, Russell Hite, Arthur Miller, Sidney Lenyo, Gary Glowacki, Debbie Delaney, Tammy Perkins, Don Wolf, Michael Howenstine, Jean Fuhrman.

1965: Dr. Howard Jones, president of Youngstown University, announces the university will begin construction of a $1.75 million science building in the fall. It will be named for Ward Beecher, former director of Commercial Shearing & Stamping Co., who made a substantial contribution toward construction.

Lethra C. Astry, a prominent Salem Republican, is appointed by Gov. James Rhodes to serve on the Ohio Bridge Commission.

Dr. Robert B. Day, a senior scientist at Los Alamos, N.M., nuclear laboratory and son of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Day of Warren, is one of three mountain climbers killed in a fall on a Colorado mountain slope.

1940: A subcommittee of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics will visit Youngstown to inspect the new municipal airport as the possible location for an $8.4 million airplane-engine research laboratory being planned by the federal government.

A suit to restrain the Ohio Bell Telephone Co. from discontinuing service to Youngstown bookie joints is filed in Mahoning Common Pleas Court by William Hamilton, local representative for Empire New Service and H.F. Crowley, Steubenville representatives.

Edward J.D. Newitt Jr., 13, of London, a city under bombardment by Nazi planes, comes to Youngstown to live with his aunt Mrs. J.L. Baker, 1664 Pointview Ave. Both his parents are British, but he was born in Scranton, Pa., making him a U.S. citizen who could easily re-enter the country.