Today in HIstory....September 26

On this day in …


* 1777, British troops occupied Philadelphia during the American Revolution

* 1789, Thomas Jefferson was appointed America's first secretary of state

* 1892, John Philip Sousa and his newly formed band performed publicly for the first time, at the Stillman Music Hall in Plainfield, N.J.

* 1907, New Zealand went from being a colony to a dominion within the British Empire

* 1914, the Federal Trade Commission was established

* 1955, following word that President Eisenhower had suffered a heart attack, the New York Stock Exchange saw its worst price decline since 1929

* 1981, the twin-engine Boeing 767 made its official debut in Everett, Wash.

* 1991, four men and four women began a two-year stay inside a sealed-off structure in Oracle, Ariz., called Biosphere 2. (They emerged from Biosphere on this date in 1993.)

* 1997, an Indonesian Airbus A-300 crashed while approaching Medan Airport in north Sumatra, killing all 234 people aboard

* 2002, WorldCom former controller David Myers pleaded guilty to securities fraud, saying he was told by "senior management" to falsify records in what became the largest corporate accounting scandal in U.S. history. (Myers was later sentenced to one year and one day in prison.)

* 2006, President Bush ordered release of a declassified version of a government intelligence report that said the war in Iraq had become a "cause celebre" for Islamic extremists. ALSO: Former Enron chief financial officer Andrew Fastow was sentenced by a federal judge in Houston to six years in prison for his role in the fallen energy company's bankruptcy