This day in history
Today is Monday, July 31, the 212th day of 2023. There are 153 days left in the year.
Today’s Birthdays: Actor Don Murray is 94. Actor France Nuyen is 84. Actor Susan Flannery is 84. Singer Lobo is 79. Actor Geraldine Chaplin is 79. Singer Gary Lewis is 78. Former Massachusetts governor William Weld is 78. International Tennis Hall of Famer Evonne Goolagong Cawley is 72. Actor Barry Van Dyke is 72. Actor Actor James Read is 70. Actor Michael Biehn is 67. Former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick is 67. Entrepreneur Mark Cuban is 65. Rock musician Bill Berry (R.E.M.) is 65. Musician Fatboy Slim is 60. Rock musician Jim Corr is 59. Author J.K. Rowling is 58. Actor Dean Cain is 57. Actor Eve Best is 52. Country singer-musician Zac Brown is 45. Actor-producer-writer B.J. Novak is 44. NHL center Evgeni Malkin is 37. Hip-hop artist Lil Uzi Vert is 29. Actor Rico Rodriguez is 25.
▸In 1715, a fleet of Spanish ships carrying gold, silver and jewelry sank during a hurricane off the east Florida coast; of some 2,500 crew members, more than 1,000 died.
▸In 1775, General George Washington ordered Major Benjamin Tupper to take 300 men and destroy Boston Light house. The men overwhelmed the British but the tides left them stranded on the island and vulnerable to British reinforcements. Nonetheless, the soldiers defeated the British a second time on the Little Brewster Island before returning to the mainland.
▸In 1777, during the Revolutionary War, the Marquis de Lafayette, a 19-year-old French nobleman, was made a majorgeneral in the American Continental Army.
▸Ine 1919, Germany’s Weimar Constitution was adopted by the republic’s National Assembly.
▸In 1945, Pierre Laval, premier of the pro-Nazi Vichy government in France, surrendered to US authorities in Austria; he was turned over to France, which later tried and executed him.
▸In 1953, Sen. Robert A. Taft of Ohio, known as “Mr. Republican,” died in New York at age 63.
▸In 1957, the Distant Early Warning Line, a system of radar stations designed to detect Soviet bombers approaching North America, went into operation.
▸In 1970, “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” came to an end after nearly 14 years as co-anchor Chet Huntley signed off for the last time; the broadcast was renamed “NBC Nightly News.”
▸In 1971, Apollo 15 crew members David Scott and James Irwin became the first astronauts to use a lunar rover on the surface of the moon.
▸In 1972, Democratic vicepresidential candidate Thomas Eagleton withdrew from the ticket with George McGovern following disclosures that Eagleton had once undergone psychiatric treatment. Massachusetts Correction Officer Alfred Baranowski and Correction Officer James Souza were shot and killed during an escape attempt by a convicted murderer from the Norfolk Prison. The state’s maximum-security facility in Lancaster were named after them.
▸In 1973, Delta Air Lines Flight 723 mised the runway in Logan International Airport amid low visibility and struck a sea wall. The crash, the worst commercial aviation disaster in New England, would eventually take the lives of all 89 people on board.
▸In 1981, a seven-week-old Major League Baseball strike ended.
▸In 1991, President George H.W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in Moscow.
▸In 2003, the Vatican launched a global campaign against gay marriages, warning Catholic politicians that support of same-sex unions was “gravely immoral” and urging non-Catholics to join the offensive.
▸In 2013, President Barack Obama’s national security team acknowledged for the first time that, when investigating one suspected terrorist, it could read and store the phone records of millions of Americans. Voters in Zimbabwe went to the polls in national elections that were won by President Robert Mugabe amid opponents’ allegations of fraud.
▸In 2018, Jury selection began in the trial of Paul Manafort, President Donald Trump’s former campaign chairman; he was accused of failing to report tens of millions of dollars in Ukrainian political consulting fees. (Manafort was sentenced to a total of seven and a-half years in prison after being convicted at trial in Virginia and pleading guilty in Washington to two conspiracy counts.) Actor Alan Alda revealed that he has Parkinson’s disease, telling “CBS This Morning” that he’d been diagnosed three and a half years ago.
▸In 2020, a federal appeals court overturned the death sentence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, saying the judge who oversaw the case didn’t adequately screen jurors for potential biases. (The Supreme Court later reimposed the sentence.)
▸Last year, Bill Russell, the NBA great who anchored a Boston Celtics dynasty that won 11 championships in 13 years — the last two as the first Black head coach in any major US sport — and marched for civil rights with Martin Luther King Jr., died at age 88. Nichelle Nichols, who broke barriers for Black women in Hollywood when she played communications officer Lt. Uhura on the original “Star Trek” television series, died at 89.