TODAY IN HISTORY

On July 30, 1619, the first representative assembly in the American colonies met in Jamestown, Va. (It enacted laws against idleness, drunkenness and gambling.)

In 1729 the city of Baltimore was founded.

In 1792 “La Marseillaise,” the French national anthem, was sung in Paris for the first time.

In 1932 the Olympic Games opened in Los Angeles.

In 1942 President Franklin Roosevelt signed a bill creating the Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, a Navy auxiliary known as the WAVES.

In 1945, during World War II, the battle cruiser USS Indianapolis, which had just delivered components for the atomic bomb that would be dropped on Hiroshima, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine; only 316 out of 1,196 men survived the sinking and the shark-infested waters.

In 1965, as former President Harry Truman looked on, President Lyndon Johnson signed Medicare into law at a ceremony in Independence, Mo., Truman’s hometown. (The act took effect in 1966.)

In 1975, outside a suburban Detroit restaurant, former Teamsters union President Jimmy Hoffa was seen in public for the last time. Also

in 1975 representatives of 35 countries convened in Finland for a conference on security and human rights that resulted in the Helsinki Accords.