Today in History: December 17, the Wright Brothers’ first flight

Today in history: On Dec. 17, 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright of Dayton, Ohio, conducted the first successful manned powered-airplane flights near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, using their experimental craft, the Wright Flyer. In 1944, the U.S. Army’s Western Defense Command rescinded orders to incarcerate people of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast during World War II; over 110,000 men, woman and children of Japanese ancestry, about two-thirds of whom were American citizens, had been forced into camps and held by armed guards following a February 1942 executive order by President Franklin Roosevelt. Bush, Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in separate ceremonies. In 2014, the United States and communist Cuba restored diplomatic relations after decades of mutual animosity, sweeping away one of the last vestiges of the Cold War.