TODAY IN HISTORY

TUESDAY AUG 3, 2021

1936

Jesse Owens of the United States won the first of his four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics as he took the 100-meter sprint.

1914

Germany declared war on France at the onset of World War I.

1949

The National Basketball Association was formed as a merger of the Basketball Association of America and the National Basketball League.

1966

Comedian Lenny Bruce, whose raunchy brand of satire and dark humor landed him in trouble with the law, was found dead in his Los Angeles home; he was 40.

1972

The U.S. Senate ratified the Anti-ballistic Missile Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union.

1981

U.S. air traffic controllers went on strike, despite a warning from President Ronald Reagan they would be fired, which they were.

1993

The Senate voted 96-to-three to confirm Supreme Court nominee Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

1994

Arkansas carried out the nation’s first triple execution in 32 years. Stephen G. Breyer was sworn in as the Supreme Court’s newest justice in a private ceremony at Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist’s Vermont summer home.

2004

The Statue of Liberty pedestal in New York City reopened to the public for the first time since the 9⁄11 attacks.

2005

fourteen Marines from a Reserve unit in Ohio were killed in a roadside bombing in Iraq.

2014

Israel withdrew most of its ground troops from the Gaza Strip in an apparent winding down of a nearly monthlong operation against Hamas that had left more than 1,800Palestinians and more than 60 Israelis dead.