Also on this date
In 1867,
President Andrew Johnson sparked a move to impeach him as he defied Congress by suspending Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, with whom he had clashed over Reconstruction policies. (Johnson was acquitted by the Senate.)
In 1909,
the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, home to the Indianapolis 500, first opened.
In 1981,
IBM introduced its first personal computer, the model 5150, at a press conference in New York.
In 1985,
the world’s worst singleaircraft disaster occurred as a crippled Japan Airlines Boeing 747 on a domestic flight crashed into a mountain, killing 520 people. (Four people survived.)
In 1994,
in baseball’s eighth work stoppage since 1972, players went on strike rather than allow team owners to limit their salaries. (The strike ended in April 1995.)
In 2000,
the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk and its 118-man crew were lost during naval exercises in the Barents Sea.
In 2017,
a car plowed into a crowd of people protesting a white nationalist rally in the Virginia college town of Charlottesville, killing 32year-old Heather Heyer and hurting more than a dozen others. (The attacker, James Alex Fields, was sentenced to life in prison on 29 federal hate crime charges, and life plus 419 years on state charges.) President Donald Trump condemned what he called an “egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides.”
Ten years ago:
The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta struck down the centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s sweeping health care overhaul, the so-called individual mandate. (The mandate was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in June 2012.)
Five years ago:
A judge in Milwaukee overturned the conviction of Brendan Dassey, who was found guilty of helping his uncle kill a woman in a case profiled in the Netflix series “Making a Murderer,” ruling that investigators coerced a confession using deceptive tactics. (The ruling was later overturned by a federal appeals court; the U.S. Supreme Court would decline to hear the case.)
One year ago:
President Donald Trump again pressed Congress to steer future coronavirus funding away from schools that did not reopen in the fall.