ON JULY 14 ...
In 1789 igniting the French Revolution, the citizens of Paris stormed the Bastille prison and released seven inmates.
In 1798 Congress passed the Sedition Act, making it a federal crime to publish false, scandalous or malicious writings about the U.S. government.
In 1881 outlaw William Bonney Jr., alias Billy the Kid, was shot and killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett in Fort Sumner, New Mexico.
In 1912 folk singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma.
In 1913 Gerald Ford, who would become the nation’s 38th president, was born in Omaha, Nebraska.
In 1921
Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were convicted in Dedham, Massachusetts, of killing a shoe company paymaster and his guard. (Sacco and Vanzetti would be executed six years later.)
In 1933 Germany banned all political parties except the Nazi Party.
In 1965 Adlai Stevenson II, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, former Democratic presidential candidate and a former Illinois governor, died in London; he was 65.
In 1966 eight student nurses were killed in their Southeast Side dormitory. (Richard Speck would be convicted of murder and sent to prison, where he died in 1991, a day short of his 50th birthday.)
In 1980 National
the Republican Convention opened in Detroit, where nominee-apparent Ronald Reagan told a welcoming rally he and his supporters were determined to “make America great again.”
In 1999 Argentina and the British Falkland Islands ended a 17-year-old standoff, resuming air links severed after the 1982 war.
In 2000 a Miami jury ordered America’s biggest cigarette makers to pay nearly $145 billion in punitive damages to ill Florida smokers. (However, in 2003, a state appeals court reversed not only the award but also the class action unifying hundreds of thousands of sick Florida smokers under a single lawsuit; the Florida Supreme Court agreed in May 2004 to review that decision.)
In 2001 Katharine Graham, the 84-year-old chairwoman of the executive committee of The Washington Post Co., suffered a head injury in a fall in Sun Valley, Idaho. (She died three days later.)
In 2004 the Senate scuttled a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage (48 senators voted to advance the measure — 12 short of the 60 needed — and 50 voted to block it).
In 2014 a subway train in Moscow derailed, killing 21 and injuring 160, in the deadliest incident in the Russian capital’s underground system since twin bombings in 2010.
In 2015 NASA’s unmanned spacecraft New Horizons swept within 7,700 miles of Pluto and transmitted images that arrived on Earth the next day that revealed mountains and an absence of craters.