Today in history
On July 28, 1540 , King Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, was beheaded in England on charges of treason; on the same day, Henry married his fifth wife, Catherine Howard.
In 1655 French dramatist and novelist Cyrano de Bergerac, the inspiration for a play by Edmond Rostand, died in Paris.
In 1750 German composer Johann Sebastian Bach died in Leipzig, Germany.
In 1794 French revolutionaries Maximilien Robespierre and Louis Antoine Saint-Just were sent to the guillotine, ending the Reign of Terror.
In 1821 Peru proclaimed its independence from Spain.
In 1868 the 14th Amendment to the Constitution took effect, guaranteeing due process of law.
In 1896 the city of Miami was incorporated.
In 1914 World War I began when Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia.
In 1929 Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis was born in Southampton, N.Y.
In 1932 federal troops dispersed the “Bonus Army” of poor, unemployed World War I veterans who had gathered in Washington since May to seek additional benefits.
In 1943 President Franklin Roosevelt announced the end of coffee rationing.
In 1945 the Senate ratified the U.N. charter.
In 1945 an Army B-25 bomber crashed into the 79th floor of New York’s Empire State Building, killing 14 people.
In 1959, in preparation for statehood, Hawaiians voted to send Hiram Fong to the Senate as its first ChineseAmerican member and Daniel Inouye to the House as its first Japanese-American.
In 1972 the Beijing government reported that Chinese Defense Minister Lin Piao had tried to kill Chairman Mao Zedong and had died in a plane crash Sept. 12, 1971, while trying to flee China.
In 1976 more than 240,000 people died when an earthquake struck northern China’s Tangshan province.
In 1980 Fernando Belaunde Terry returned to the presidency of Peru, ending 12 years of military rule.
In 1982 the U.S. House voted to bar funds for the development, testing, procurement or operation of any nuclear weapon that would undercut the two SALT agreements with the Soviet Union.
In 1984 the Summer Olympics opened in Los Angeles, minus a Soviet-led bloc of 15 nations, plus Iran, Libya, Albania and Bolivia.
In 1988 Congress approved $6 billion in aid for droughtstricken farmers.
In 1989 Israeli commandos abducted a pro-Iranian Shiite Muslim cleric, Sheik AbdulKarim Obeid, from his home in southern Lebanon.
In 2000 Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori was sworn in for an unprecedented third term, infuriating demonstrators who set government buildings ablaze.
In 2002 American cyclist Lance Armstrong won his fourth consecutive Tour de France. (He was stripped of the title in 2012.)
In 2005 the Irish Republican Army renounced the use of violence against British rule in Northern Ireland and said it would disarm.
In 2013 a bus crashed through a guardrail and plunged nearly 100 feet near Baiano, Italy, killing 38 people.
In 2016 Hillary Clinton became the first female presidential nominee from a major party with her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
In 2017 Charlie Gard, the terminally ill British baby at the center of a legal and ethical battle whose parents lost their fight for the right to take him to the U.S. for an experimental medical treatment for a rare genetic disease, died, after being taken off a ventilator, of mitochondrial depletion syndrome; he was 11 months old.