Today in history
On July 11, 1804, Vice President Aaron Burr mortally wounded former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton during a pistol duel in Weehawken, New Jersey. (Hamilton died the next day.)
In 1798, the U.S. Marine Corps was formally re-established by a congressional act that also created the U.S. Marine Band.
In 1859, Big Ben, the great bell inside the famous London clock tower, chimed for the first time.
In 1915, the Chicago Sunday Tribune ran an article titled, “Blues Is Jazz and Jazz Is Blues.” (It’s believed to be one of the earliest, if not the earliest, uses of the word “jazz” as a musical term by a newspaper.)
In 1936, New York City’s Triborough Bridge (now officially the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge) linking Manhattan, Queens and The Bronx was opened to traffic.
In 1955, the U.S. Air Force Academy swore in its first class of cadets at its temporary quarters at Lowry Air Force Base in Colorado.
In 1960, the novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee was first published by J.B. Lippincott and Co.
In 1972, the World Chess Championship opened as grandmasters Bobby Fischer of the United States and defending champion Boris Spassky of the Soviet Union began play in Reykjavik, Iceland. (Fischer won after 21 games.)
In 1974, the House Judiciary Committee released volumes of evidence it had gathered in its Watergate inquiry.
In 1979, the abandoned U.S. space station Skylab made a spectacular return to Earth, burning up in the atmosphere and showering debris over the Indian Ocean and Australia.
In 1995, the U.N.-designated “safe haven” of Srebrenica (sreh-breh-NEET’-sah) in Bosnia-Herzegovina fell to Bosnian Serb forces, who then carried out the killings of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys. The United States normalized relations with Vietnam.
In 2017, emails released by Donald Trump Jr. revealed that he’d been told before meeting with a Russian attorney during the presidential campaign that the Russian government had information that could “incriminate” Hillary Clinton. MSNBC “Morning Joe” host and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough announced that he was leaving the Republican party, partly because of its loyalty to President Donald Trump.
Ten years ago: Over the din of vuvuzela horns in Johannesburg, South Africa, Spain won soccer’s World Cup after an exhausting 1-0 victory in extra time over the Netherlands.
Five years ago: Top Mexican drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, head of the powerful Sinaloa Cartel, escaped from a maximum security prison in Mexico for the second time by exiting through a secretly dug mile-long tunnel (he was recaptured in January 2016 and is serving a life sentence at a supermax prison in Colorado following a conviction on U.S. drug-trafficking charges.) Serena Williams won her sixth title at Wimbledon, beating Garbine Muguruza of Spain 6-4, 6-4 in the women’s final; for Williams, it was her second “Serena Slam” — holding all four major titles at the same time.
One year ago: Singer R. Kelly was arrested in Chicago after he was indicted on 13 federal counts including sex crimes. (Kelly has pleaded not guilty; a trial is set for later this year.) President Donald Trump abandoned his effort to put a citizenship question into the 2020 census, instead telling federal agencies to try to compile the information through existing databases.