TODAY IN WORLD HISTORY
Today is Thursday, July 6, the 187th day of 2017. There are 178 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlights in History
On July 6, 1957, Althea Gibson became the first black tennis player to win a Wimbledon singles title as she defeated fellow American Darlene Hard 6-3, 6-2. The Harry S. Truman Library, the nation’s first presidential library, was dedicated in Independence, Missouri. Sixteen-year-old John Lennon first met 15-year-old Paul McCartney when Lennon’s band, the Quarrymen skiffle group, performed a gig at St. Peter’s Church in Woolton, Liverpool.
On this date
• In 1535, Sir Thomas More was executed in England for high treason.
• In 1777, during the American Revolution, British forces captured Fort Ticonderoga.
• In 1885, French scientist Louis Pasteur tested an anti-rabies vaccine on 9-year-old Joseph Meister, who had been bitten by an infected dog; the boy did not develop rabies.
• In 1917, during World War I, Arab forces led by T.E. Lawrence and Auda Abu Tayi captured the port of Aqaba (AH’-kah-buh) from the Ottoman Turks.
• In 1933, the first All-Star baseball game was played at Chicago’s Comiskey Park; the American League defeated the National League, 4-2.
• In 1942, Anne Frank, her parents and sister entered a “secret annex” in an Amsterdam building where they were later joined by four other people; they hid from Nazi occupiers for two years before being discovered and arrested.
• In 1944, an estimated 168 people died in a fire that broke out during a performance in the main tent of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Hartford, Connecticut.
• In 1964, the movie “A Hard Day’s Night,” starring The Beatles, had its world premiere in London. British colony Nyasaland became the independent country of Malawi.
• In 1967, war erupted as Nigeria sent troops into the secessionist state of Biafra. (The Biafran (beeAF’-ruhn) War lasted 2 1/2 years and resulted in a Nigerian victory.)
• In 1971, jazz trumpeter and singer Louis Armstrong died in New York at age 69.
• In 1988, 167 North Sea oil workers were killed when explosions and fires destroyed a drilling platform. Medical waste and other debris began washing up on New York City-area seashores, forcing the closing of several popular beaches.
• In 1997, the rover Sojourner rolled down a ramp from the Mars Pathfinder lander onto the Martian landscape to begin inspecting the soil and rocks of the red planet.
Ten years ago
A man on a balcony over the New York-New York casino floor in Las Vegas opened fire on the gamblers below, wounding four people before he was tackled by off-duty military reservists. (The gunman, Steven Zegrean, was later convicted of charges including attempted murder and was sentenced to 26 to 90 years in prison; he died in April 2010 less than a year into his term.) Kathleen E. Woodiwiss, pioneer of the modern historical romance novel, died in Princeton, Minnesota, at age 68.