TODAY IN HISTORY

HIGHLIGHT IN HISTORY

On July 15, 1916, Boeing Co., originally known as Pacific Aero Products Co., was founded in Seattle.

ALSO ON THIS DATE 1834

The Spanish Inquisition was abolished more than 3 1⁄2 centuries after its creation.

1870

Georgia became the last Confederate state to be readmitted to the Union.

1913

Democrat Augustus Bacon of Georgia became the first person elected to the U.S. Senate under the terms of the recently ratified 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, providing for popular election of senators.

1975

Three American astronauts blasted off aboard an Apollo spaceship hours after two Soviet cosmonauts were launched aboard a Soyuz spacecraft for a mission that included a linkup of the two ships in orbit.

1976

A 36-hour kidnap ordeal began for 26 schoolchildren and their bus driver as they were abducted near Chowchilla, California, by three gunmen and imprisoned in an underground cell. (The captives escaped unharmed; the kidnappers were caught.)

1996

MSNBC, a 24-hour all-news network, made its debut on cable and the internet.

1997

Fashion designer Gianni Versace, 50, was shot dead outside his Miami Beach home; suspected gunman Andrew Phillip Cunanan, 27, was found dead eight days later, a suicide. (Investigators believed Cunanan killed four other people before Versace in a cross-country rampage that began the previous March.

2002

John Walker Lindh, an American who’d fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan, pleaded guilty in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, to two felonies in a deal sparing him life in prison.