TODAY IN HISTORY

TODAY’S HIGHLIGHT 1866

Ulysses S. Grant was named General of the Army of the United States, the first officer to hold the rank.

ALSO ON THIS DATE 1814

The Battle of Lundy’s Lane, one of the bloodiest battles of the War of 1812, took place in present-day Niagara Falls, Ontario, with no clear victor.

1898

The United States invaded Puerto Rico during the Spanish-American War.

1943

Benito Mussolini was dismissed as premier of Italy by King Victor Emmanuel III, and placed under arrest.

1946

The United States detonated an atomic bomb near Bikini Atoll in the Pacific in the first underwater test of the device.

1952

Puerto Rico became a selfgoverning commonwealth of the United States.

1956

The Italian liner SS Andrea Doria collided with the Swedish passenger ship Stockholm off the New England coast late at night and began sinking; 51 people — 46 from the Andrea Doria, five from the Stockholm — were killed.

1960

A Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, North Carolina, that had been the scene of a sit-in protest against its whites-only lunch counter dropped its segregation policy.

1972

The notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiment came to light as The Associated Press reported that for the previous four decades, the U.S. Public Health Service, in conjunction with the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, had been allowing poor, rural Black male patients with syphilis to go without treatment, even allowing them to die, as a way of studying the disease.