TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT 1974

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that President Richard Nixon had to turn over subpoenaed White House tape recordings to the Watergate special prosecutor.

ALSO ON THIS DATE 1847

Mormon leader Brigham Young and his followers arrived in the Great Salt Lake Valley in present-day Utah.

1858

Republican senatorial candidate Abraham Lincoln formally challenged Democrat Stephen A. Douglas to a series of political debates; the result was seven face-toface encounters.

1862

Martin Van Buren, the eighth president of the United States, and the first to have been born a U.S. citizen, died at age 79in Kinderhook, New York, the town where he was born in 1782.

1866

Tennessee became the first state to be readmitted to the Union after the Civil War.

1911

Yale University history professor Hiram Bingham III found the “Lost City of the Incas,” Machu Picchu, in Peru.

1915

The SS Eastland, a passenger ship carrying more than 2,500 people, rolled onto its side while docked at the Clark Street Bridge on the Chicago River; an estimated 844 people died in the disaster.

1937

The state of Alabama dropped charges against four of the nine young Black men accused of raping two white women in the “Scottsboro Case.”

1969

The Apollo 11 astronauts — two of whom had been the first men to set foot on the moon — splashed down safely in the Pacific.

1975

An Apollo spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific, completing a mission which included the first-ever docking with a Soyuz capsule from the Soviet Union.