Today in History
Today’s highlight:
On August 27, 2008, Barack Obama was nominated for president by the Democratic National Convention in Denver.
On this date:
1776: The Battle of Long Island began during the Revolutionary War as British troops attacked American forces who ended up being forced to retreat two days later.
1858: The second debate between senatorial candidates Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas took place in Freeport, Illinois.
1908: Lyndon Baines Johnson, the 36th president of the United States, was born near Stonewall, Texas.
1949: A violent white mob prevented an outdoor concert headlined by Paul Robeson from taking place near Peekskill, New York. The concert was held eight days later.
1963: Author, journalist and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois died in Accra, Ghana, at age 95.
1964: President Lyndon Baines Johnson accepted his party’s nomination for a term in his own right, telling the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, “Let us join together in giving every American the fullest life which he can hope for.”
1979: British war hero Lord Louis Mountbatten and three other people, including his 14-year-old grandson Nicholas, were killed off the coast of Ireland in a boat explosion claimed by the Irish Republican Army.
1989: The first U.S. commercial satellite rocket was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida — a Delta booster carrying a British communications satellite, the Marco Polo 1.
1998: Two suspects in the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya were brought to the United States to face charges. Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-‘owhali and Mohammed Saddiq Odeh were convicted in 2001 of conspiring to carry out the bombing; both were sentenced to life in prison.
2005: Coastal residents jammed freeways and gas stations as they rushed to get out of the way of Hurricane Katrina, which was headed toward New Orleans.
2006: A Comair CRJ-100 crashed after trying to take off from the wrong runway in Lexington, Kentucky, killing 49 people and leaving the co-pilot the sole survivor.
2009: Mourners filed past the closed casket of the late
Sen. Edward Kennedy at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. Jaycee Lee Dugard, kidnapped when she was 11, was reunited with her mother 18 years after her abduction in South Lake Tahoe, California.
Ten years ago: Aijalon Gomes, an American who’d been held for seven months in North Korea for trespassing, stepped off a plane in his hometown of Boston accompanied by former President Jimmy Carter, who had flown to Pyongyang to negotiate his freedom.
Five years ago: Visiting residents on tidy porch stoops and sampling food at a corner restaurant, President Barack Obama held out the people of New Orleans as an extraordinary example of renewal and resilience 10 years after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.
One year ago: Sixteen women who said they had been sexually abused by Jeffrey Epstein poured out their anger in court, as a judge gave them a chance to testify even though Epstein had died behind bars; the hearing was held on a normally routine request to throw out the indictment because of the defendant’s death.