Today in history
Today is Friday, July
22, the 203rd day of 2022. There are 162 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History
On July 22, 1937, the U.S. Senate rejected President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s proposal to add more justices to the Supreme Court.
On this date
In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln presented to his Cabinet a preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation.
In 1934, bank robber
John Dillinger was shot to death by federal agents outside Chicago’s Biograph Theater, where he had just seen the Clark Gable movie “Manhattan Melodrama.”
In 1942, the Nazis began transporting Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka concentration camp. Gasoline rationing involving the use of coupons began along the Atlantic seaboard.
In 1943, American forces led by Gen. George S. Patton captured Palermo, Sicily, during World War II.
In 1967, American author, historian and poet Carl Sandburg died at his North Carolina home at age 89.
In 1975, the House of Representatives joined the Senate in voting to restore the American citizenship of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
In 1991, police in Milwaukee arrested Jeffrey Dahmer, who later confessed to murdering 17 men and boys (Dahmer ended up being beaten to death by a fellow prison inmate).
In 1992, Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar escaped from his luxury prison near Medellin (meh-deh-YEEN’). (He was slain by security forces in December 1993.)
In 2011, Anders Breivik (AHN’-durs BRAY’-vihk), a self-described “militant nationalist,” massacred 69 people at a Norwegian island youth retreat after detonating a bomb in nearby Oslo that killed eight others in the nation’s worst violence since World War II.
In 2013, the Duchess of Cambridge, the former Kate Middleton, gave birth to a son, Prince George, who became third in line to the British throne after Prince Charles and Prince William.
In 2015, a federal grand jury indictment charged Dylann Roof, the young man accused of killing nine Black church members in Charleston, South Carolina, with 33 counts including hate crimes that made him eligible for the death penalty. (Roof would become the first person sentenced to death for a federal hate crime; he is on death row at a federal prison in Indiana.)
In 2020, the mayor of Portland, Oregon, was among those tear-gassed by U.S. government agents as he appeared outside a federal courthouse during raucous protests; Ted Wheeler and hundreds of others were objecting to the presence of federal police sent by President Donald Trump. California surpassed New York as the state with the highest number of confirmed coronavirus cases. Twitter said it would crack down on accounts and content related to the far-right conspiracy theory QAnon.