Today’s Highlight in History:

On September 29, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965, creating the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts; during the signing ceremony, the president said the measure would create an American Film Institute.

On this date:

In 1789, the U.S. War Department established a regular army with a strength of several hundred men.

In 1829, London’s reorganized police force, which became known as Scotland Yard, went on duty.

In 1907, the foundation stone was laid for the Washington National Cathedral.

In 1910, the National Urban League, which had its beginnings as The Committee on Urban Conditions Among Negroes, was established in New York.

In 1938, British, French, German and Italian leaders concluded the Munich Agreement, which was aimed at appeasing Adolf Hitler by allowing Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland.

In 1943, General Dwight D. Eisenhower and Italian Marshal Pietro Badoglio signed an armistice aboard the British ship HMS Nelson off Malta.

In 1955, a one-act version of the Arthur Miller play “A View From the Bridge” opened in New York. (Miller later turned it into a two-act play.)

In 1962, Canada joined the space age as it launched the Alouette 1 satellite from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The musical “My Fair Lady” closed on Broadway after 2,717 performances.

In 1975, baseball manager Casey Stengel died in Glendale, California, at age 85.

In 1978, Pope John Paul I was found dead in his Vatican apartment just over a month after becoming head of the Roman Catholic Church.

In 1982, Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules laced with deadly cyanide claimed the first of seven victims in the Chicago area. (To date, the case remains unsolved.)

In 1990, the Washington National Cathedral, begun in 1907, was formally completed with President George H.W. Bush overseeing the laying of the final stone atop the southwest pinnacle of the cathedral’s St. Paul Tower.

Ten years ago: John G. Roberts Jr. was sworn in as the nation’s 17th chief justice after winning Senate confirmation. New York Times reporter Judith Miller was released from 85 days of federal detention after agreeing to testify in a criminal probe into the leak of a covert CIA officer’s identity. Three suicide car bombs exploded nearly simultaneously in Balad, a mostly Shiite town north of Baghdad, killing some 60 people.

Five years ago: Anti-austerity protests erupted across Europe; Greek doctors and railway employees walked off the job, Spanish workers shut down trains and buses, and one man rammed a cement truck into the Irish parliament to protest the country’s enormous bank bailouts. Actor Tony Curtis, 85, died in Henderson, Nevada.

One year ago: In a blistering speech to the United Nations, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned that Hamas and the Islamic State group were “branches of the same poisonous tree,” both bent on world domination through terror, just as the Nazis had done. Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai was sworn in as Afghanistan’s new president, replacing Hamid Karzai in the country’s first democratic transfer of power since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion toppled the Taliban.

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