TODAY IN WORLD HISTORY
Today is Saturday, July 22, the 203rd day of 2017. There are 162 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlights in History On July 22, 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.
On this date • In 1587, an English colony fated to vanish under mysterious circumstances was established on Roanoke Island off North Carolina.
• In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln presented to his Cabinet a preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation.
• In 1916, 10 people were killed when a suitcase bomb went off during San Francisco’s Preparedness Day parade; two anti-war labor radicals, Thomas Mooney and Warren K. Billings, were jailed but eventually released amid doubts about their guilt.
• 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 1992, Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar escaped from his luxury prison near Medellin . (He was slain by security forces in December 1993.)
• In 2011, Anders Breivik, a selfdescribed “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.
On July 23 • In 1829, William Austin Burt received a patent for his “typographer,” a forerunner of the typewriter.
• In 1885, Ulysses S. Grant, the 18th president of the United States, died in Mount McGregor, New York, at age 63.
• In 1914, Austria-Hungary presented a list of demands to Serbia following the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serb assassin; Serbia’s refusal to agree to the entire ultimatum led to the outbreak of World War I.
• In 1962, the first public TV transmissions over Telstar 1 took place during a special program featuring live shots beamed from the United States to Europe, and vice versa.
• In 1986, Britain’s Prince Andrew married Sarah Ferguson at Westminster Abbey in London. (The couple divorced in 1996.)
• In 1997, the search for Andrew Cunanan, the suspected killer of designer Gianni Versace and others, ended as police found his body on a houseboat in Miami Beach, an apparent suicide.
• In 2011, singer Amy Winehouse, 27, was found dead in her London home from accidental alcohol poisoning.
On July 24 • In 1862, Martin Van Buren, the eighth president of the United States, and the first to have been born a U.S. citizen, died at age 79 in Kinderhook, N.Y., the town where he was born in 1782.
• In 1866, Tennessee became the first state to be readmitted to the Union after the Civil War.
• In 1915, the SS Eastland, a passenger ship carrying more than 2,500 people, rolled onto its side while docked at the Clark Street Bridge on the Chicago River; an estimated 844 people died in the disaster.
• In 1937, the state of Alabama dropped charges against four of the nine young black men accused of raping two white women in the “Scottsboro Case.”
• In 1959, during a visit to Moscow, Vice President Richard Nixon engaged in his famous “Kitchen Debate” with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
• In 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that President Richard Nixon had to turn over subpoenaed White House tape recordings to the Watergate special prosecutor.
• In 2002, nine coal miners became trapped in a flooded tunnel of the Quecreek Mine in western Pennsylvania; the story ended happily 77 hours later with the rescue of all nine.