TODAY IN HISTORY
Today is Sunday, July 19, the 201st day of 2020. There are 165 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On July 19, 1993, President Bill Clinton announced a policy allowing homosexuals to serve in the military under a compromise dubbed “don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue.”
On this date:
In 1812, during the War of 1812, the First Battle of Sackets Harbor in Lake Ontario resulted in an American victory as U. S. naval forces repelled a British attack.
In 1943, Allied air forces raided Rome during World War II, the same day Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met in Feltre in northern Italy.
In 1944, the Democratic national convention convened in Chicago with the nomination of President Franklin D. Roosevelt considered a certainty.
In 1961, TWA became the first airline to begin showing regularly scheduled inflight movies as it presented “By Love Possessed” to firstclass passengers on a flight from New York to Los Angeles.
In 1969, Apollo 11 and its astronauts, Neil Armstrong,
Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins, went into orbit around the moon.
In 1980, the Moscow Summer Olympics began, minus dozens of nations that were boycotting the games because of the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan.
In 1985, Christa McAuliffe of New Hampshire was chosen to be the first schoolteacher to ride aboard the space shuttle. ( McAuliffe and six other crew members died when the Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff in January 1986.)
In 1989, 111 people were killed when United Air Lines Flight 232, a DC-10 which suffered the uncontained failure of its tail engine and the loss of hydraulic systems, crashed while making an emergency landing at Sioux City, Iowa; 185 other people survived.
In 1990, baseball’s alltime hits leader, Pete Rose, was sentenced in Cincinnati to five months in prison for tax evasion.
In 2006, prosecutors reported that Chicago police beat, kicked, shocked or otherwise tortured scores of Black suspects from the 1970s to the early 1990s to try to extract confessions from them.