Today in history

Today is Tuesday, June 23, the 175th day of 2020. There are 191 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History

On June 23, 1888, abolitionist Frederick Douglass received one vote from the Kentucky delegation at the Republican convention in Chicago, effectively making him the first Black candidate to have his name placed in nomination for U.S. president. (The nomination went to Benjamin Harrison.)

On this date

In 1868, Christopher Latham Sholes received a patent for his “Type-Writer,” featuring a QWERTY keyboard; it was the first commercially successful typewriter.

In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt was nominated for a second term of office at the Republican National Convention in Chicago.

In 1938, the Civil Aeronautics Authority was established.

In 1947, the Senate joined the House in overriding President Harry S. Truman’s veto of the Taft-Hartley Act, designed to limit the power of organized labor.

In 1969, Warren E. Burger was sworn in as chief justice of the United States by the man he was succeeding, Earl Warren.

In 1972, President Richard Nixon and White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman discussed using the CIA to obstruct the FBI’s Watergate investigation. (Revelation of the tape recording of this conversation sparked Nixon’s resignation in 1974.) President Nixon signed Title IX barring discrimination on the basis of sex for “any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”

In 1985, all 329 people aboard an Air India Boeing 747 were killed when the plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean near Ireland because of a bomb authorities believe was planted by Sikh separatists.

In 1988, James E. Hansen, a climatologist at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told a Senate panel that global warming of the earth caused by the “greenhouse effect” was a reality.

In 1993, in a case that drew widespread attention, Lorena Bobbitt of Prince William County, Va., sexually mutilated her husband, John, after he’d allegedly raped her. (John Bobbitt was later acquitted of marital sexual assault; Lorena Bobbitt was later acquitted of malicious wounding by reason of insanity.)