Today in History
Today’s highlight:
On July 26, 2016, Hillary Clinton became the first woman to be nominated for president by a major political party at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
On this date:
1775: The Continental Congress established a Post Office and appointed Benjamin Franklin its Postmaster-general. 1863: Sam Houston, former president of the Republic of Texas, died in Huntsville at age 70. 1908: U.S. Attorney General Charles J. Bonaparte ordered creation of a force of special agents that was a forerunner of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
1925: Five days after the end of the Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, prosecutor William Jennings Bryan died at age 65. Although Bryan had won a conviction against John
T. Scopes for teaching
Darwin’s Theory of
Evolution, the verdict was later overturned.
1953: began his Fidel Castro
revolt against Fulgencio Batista with an unsuccessful attack on an army barracks in eastern Cuba. Castro ousted Batista in 1959. 1986: Islamic radicals in
Lebanon released the Rev. Lawrence Martin Jenco, an American hostage held for nearly 19 months. 1990: President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act.
2002: The Republican-led House voted, 295-132, to create an enormous Homeland Security Department in the biggest government reorganization in decades.
2006: In a dramatic turnaround from her first murder trial,
Andrea Yates was found not guilty by reason of insanity by a Houston jury in the bathtub drownings of her five children; she was committed to a state mental hospital. Yates had initially been found guilty of murder, but had her conviction overturned. 2013: Ariel Castro, the man who’d imprisoned three women in his Cleveland home, subjecting them to a decade of rapes and beatings, pleaded guilty to 937 counts in a deal to avoid the death penalty. Castro later committed suicide in prison. 2017: President Donald Trump announced on Twitter that he would not “accept or allow” transgender people to serve in the U.S. military. After a legal battle, the Defense Department approved a new policy requiring most individuals to serve in their birth gender.