THIS DAY IN HISTORY
Today is Monday, July 18, the 199th day of 2022. There are 166 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On July 18, 1969, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., left a party on Chappaquiddick Island near Martha’s Vineyard with Mary Jo Kopechne, 28; Kennedy’s car later went off a bridge into the water. Kennedy was able to escape, but Kopechne drowned.
On this date:
In 1536, the English Parliament passed an act declaring the authority of the pope void in England.
In 1863, during the Civil War, Union troops spearheaded by the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, made up of Black soldiers, charged Confederate-held Fort Wagner on Morris Island, S.C. The Confederates were able to repel the Northerners, who suffered heavy losses; the 54th’s commander, Col. Robert Gould Shaw, was among those who were killed.
In 1918, South African anti-apartheid leader and president Nelson Mandela was born in the village of Mvezo.
In 1925, Adolf Hitler published the first volume of his autobiographical screed, “Mein Kampf (My Struggle).”
In 1944, Hideki Tojo was removed as Japanese premier and war minister because of setbacks suffered by his country in World War II. American forces in France captured the Normandy town of St. Lo.
In 1947, President Harry S. Truman signed a Presidential Succession Act which placed the speaker of the House and the Senate president pro tempore next in the line of succession after the vice president.
In 1964, nearly a week of rioting erupted in New York’s Harlem neighborhood following the fatal police shooting of a Black teenager, James Powell, two days earlier.
In 1984, gunman James Huberty opened fire at a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California, killing 21 people before being shot dead by police. Walter F. Mondale won the Democratic presidential nomination in San Francisco.
In 1994, a bomb hidden in a van destroyed a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, killing 85. Tutsi rebels declared an end to Rwanda’s 14-week-old civil war.
In 2005, an unrepentant Eric Rudolph was sentenced in Birmingham, Alabama, to life in prison for an abortion clinic bombing that killed an off-duty police officer and maimed a nurse.