TODAY IN HISTORY

On July 12, 1543,

England’s King Henry VIII married his sixth and last wife, Catherine Parr.

In 1862,

during the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill authorizing the Army Medal of Honor.

In 1909,

the House joined the Senate in passing the 16th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, allowing for a federal income tax, and submitted it to the states. (It was declared ratified in February 1913.)

In 1957,

President Dwight D. Eisenhower was flown by helicopter from the White House to a secret mountaintop location as part of a drill involving a mock nuclear attack on Washington.

In 1962,

The Rolling Stones played their firstever gig at The Marquee in London.

In 1967,

rioting erupted in Newark, New Jersey, over the police beating of a Black taxi driver; 26 people were killed in the five days of violence that followed.

In 1974,

President Richard Nixon signed a measure creating the Congressional Budget Office. Also: Former White House aide John Ehrlichman and three others were convicted of conspiring to violate the civil rights of Daniel Ellsberg’s former psychiatrist.

In 1984,

Democratic presidential candidate Walter F. Mondale announced his choice of U.S. Rep. Geraldine A. Ferraro of New York to be his runningmate; Ferraro was the first woman to run for vice president on a major-party ticket.

In 1991,

a Japanese professor (Hitoshi Igarashi) who had translated Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” was found stabbed to death, nine days after the novel’s Italian translator was attacked in Milan.

In 1994,

President Bill Clinton, visiting Germany, went to the eastern sector of Berlin, the first U.S. president to do so since Harry Truman.

In 2003,

the USS Ronald Reagan, the first carrier named for a living president, was commissioned in Norfolk, Virginia.

In 2001,

Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant tortured in a New York City police station, agreed to an $8.7 million settlement with the city and its police union.

In 2005,

Prince Albert II of Monaco acceded to the throne of a 700-year-old dynasty.

In 2010,

Roman Polanski was declared a free man, no longer confined to house arrest in his Alpine villa, after Swiss authorities rejected a U.S. request for the Oscar-winning director’s extradition because of a 32-year-old sex conviction.

In 2015,

On the final day of his three-nation South American tour, Pope Francis put into practice his call for the world’s poor and powerless to not be left on the margins of society by visiting a flood-prone slum in Paraguay and insisting that the Catholic Church be a place of welcome for all — sick and sinners especially.

In 2019,

Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta announced that he was stepping down, amid renewed focus over his handling of a 2008 secret plea deal with financier Jeffrey Epstein when Acosta was the U.S. attorney in Miami.