1898

The U.S. Supreme Court, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, ruled 6-2 that Wong, who was born in the United States to Chinese immigrants, was an American citizen. It was the first Supreme Court decision to rule on the citizenship status of a child born in the United States to noncitizen parents.

1941

Author Virginia Woolf, 59, drowned herself near her home in Lewes, East Sussex, England. Her many books included “Mrs Dalloway” and “A Room of One’s Own.”

1979

America’s worst commercial nuclear accident occurred with a partial meltdown inside the Unit 2 reactor at the Three Mile Island plant near Middletown, Pennsylvania.