TODAY IN WORLD HISTORY
Today is Tuesday, July 11, the 192nd day of 2017. There are 173 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History
On July 11, 1767, John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States, was born in Braintree, Massachusetts.
On this date
• In 1798, the U.S. Marine Corps was formally re-established by a congressional act that also created the U.S. Marine Band.
• In 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.)
• In 1922, the Hollywood Bowl officially opened with a program called “Symphonies Under the Stars” with Alfred Hertz conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
• 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 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 1989, actor and director Laurence Olivier died in Steyning, West Sussex, England, at age 82.
• 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.
Ten years ago
Lady Bird Johnson, the former first lady who’d championed conservation and worked tenaciously for the political career of her husband, President Lyndon Johnson, died in Austin, Texas, at age 94. Pakistani army commandos completed an eight-day siege and storming of Islamabad’s radical Red Mosque; some 102 people were killed, including 10 elite troops and at least 73 suspected militants.
Five years ago
Unflinching before a skeptical NAACP crowd in Houston, Republican Mitt Romney declared he’d do more for African-Americans than Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president. Hillary Rodham Clinton became the first U.S. secretary of state to visit Laos in more than five decades. Cookbook author Marion Cunningham, 90, died in Walnut Creek. Donald J. Sobol, 87, author of the popular “Encyclopedia Brown” series of children’s mysteries, died in Miami.
One year ago
Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced that the United States would send 560 more troops to Iraq to transform a freshly retaken air base into a staging hub for a long-awaited battle to recapture Mosul from Islamic State militants. Two bailiffs at the Berrien County, Michigan, courthouse were shot to death by a jail inmate during an escape attempt; the inmate was also killed.
Thought for Today
“All men profess honesty as long as they can. To believe all men honest, would be folly. To believe none so, is something worse.” — President John Quincy Adams (1767-1848).