This Day in History

On July 11, 1804, Vice President Aaron Burr mortally wounded former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton during a pistol duel in Weehawken, New Jersey. (Hamilton died the next day.)

On this date:

In 1767, John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States, was born in Braintree, Massachusetts. In 1798, the U.S. Marine Corps was formally re-established by a congressional act that also created the U.S. Marine Band. In 1859, Big Ben, the great bell inside the famous London clock tower, chimed for the first time. In 1937, American composer and pianist George Gershwin died at a Los Angeles hospital of a brain tumor; he was 38. In 1952, the Republican National Convention, meeting in Chicago, nominated Dwight D. Eisenhower for president and Richard M. Nixon for vice president. In 1955, the U.S. Air Force Academy swore in its first class of cadets at its temporary quarters at Lowry Air Force Base in Colorado. In 1960, the novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee was first published by J.B. Lippincott and Co. In 1972, the World Chess Championship opened as grandmasters Bobby Fischer of the United States and defending champion Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union began play in Reykjavik, Iceland. (Fischer won after 21 games.) In 1977, the Presidential Medal of Freedom was presented to polio vaccine pioneer Dr. Jonas Salk and (posthumously) to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. by President Jimmy Carter. In 1979, the abandoned U.S. space station Skylab made a spectacular return to Earth, burning up in the atmosphere and showering debris over the Indian Ocean and Australia. In 1991, a Nigeria Airways DC-8 carrying Muslim pilgrims crashed at the Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, international airport, killing all 261 people on board. In 1995, the U.N.-designated “safe haven” of Srebrenica in Bosnia-Herzegovina fell to Bosnian Serb forces, who then carried out the killings of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys. The United States normalized relations with Vietnam.