On this date
Vice President Aaron Burr mortally wounded former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton during a pistol duel in Weehawken, N.J. (Hamilton died the next day.)
In 1859,
Big Ben, the great bell inside the famous London clock tower, chimed for the first time.
In 1914,
Babe Ruth made his Major League baseball debut, pitching the Boston Red Sox to a 4-3 victory over Cleveland.
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 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 1995,
the U.N.-designated “safe haven” of Srebrenica in BosniaHerzegovina 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:
Funeral services were held in Hattiesburg, Miss., for former NFL star Steve McNair, who had been shot to death in Nashville a week earlier by Sahel Kazemi, who then took her own life.
Five years ago:
Tommy Ramone, 65, a co-founder of the seminal punk band the Ramones and the last surviving member of the original group, died in New York.
One year ago:
At a NATO summit in Brussels, President Donald Trump declared that a gas pipeline venture had left Germany’s government “captive to Russia,” and questioned the necessity of the NATO alliance.