Today in History
Today’s highlight:
On July 24, 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.
On this date:
1847:
Mormon leader Brigham Young and his followers arrived in the Great Salt Lake Valley in present-day Utah.
1858:
Republican senatorial candidate Abraham Lincoln formally challenged Democrat Stephen A. Douglas to a series of political debates; the result was seven face-to-face encounters.
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, New York, the town where he was born in 1782.
1866:
Tennessee became the first state to be readmitted to the Union after the Civil War.
1911:
Yale University history professor Hiram Bingham III found the “Lost City of the Incas,” in Peru.
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.
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.”
1969:
The Apollo 11 astronauts — two of whom had been the first men to set foot on the moon — splashed down safely in the Pacific.
1975:
An Apollo spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific, completing a mission which included the first-ever docking with a Soyuz capsule from the Soviet Union.
1980:
Comedian-actor Peter Sellers died in London at 54.
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.
2018:
The Trump administration said it would provide $12 billion in emergency relief to farmers hurt by trade disputes with China and other countries. Ivanka Trump announced the shutdown of her fashion line, which had been targeted by boycotts and prompted concerns about conflicts of interest.
Ten years ago:
A stampede inside a tunnel crowded with techno music fans left 21 people dead and more than
500 injured at the famed Love Parade festival in western Germany. Fourteen-year-old Jim Liu beat Justin Thomas
4 and 2 to become the youngest U.S. Junior Amateur golf champion at Egypt Valley Country Club in Ada, Michigan.
Five years ago:
Fulfilling the hopes of millions of Kenyans, Barack Obama returned to his father’s homeland for the first time as U.S. president, a visit long sought by a country that considered him a local son. In a stunning, public attack on his own party leader, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz accused Majority Leader Mitch Mcconnell of lying, saying he was no better than his Democratic predecessor, Harry Reid, and couldn’t be trusted. One year ago: In a day of congressional testimony, Robert Mueller dismissed President Donald Trump’s claim of “total exoneration” in Mueller’s probe of Russia’s 2016 election interference.