World/nation trivia 7-20-24

July 21:

1861, during the Civil War, the first Battle of Bull Run was fought at Manassas, Virginia, resulting in a Confederate victory.

1925, the so-called “Monkey Trial” ended in Dayton, Tennessee, with John T. Scopes found guilty of violating state law for teaching Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. (The conviction was later overturned.)

1970, construction of the Aswan High Dam in Egypt was completed.

2011, the 30-year-old space shuttle program ended as Atlantis landed at Cape Canaveral, Florida, after the 135th shuttle flight.

July 22:

1862, President Abraham Lincoln presented to his Cabinet a preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation.

1937, the U.S. Senate rejected President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s proposal to add more justices to the Supreme Court.

1975, the House of Representatives joined the Senate in voting to restore the American citizenship of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.

2011, Anders Breivik, a self-described “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.

July 23:

1903, the Ford Motor Company sold its first car, a Model A, for $850.

1967, the first of five days of deadly rioting erupted in Detroit as an early morning police raid on an unlicensed bar resulted in a confrontation with local residents, escalating into violence that spread into other parts of the city and resulting in 43 deaths.

1996, at the Atlanta Olympics, Kerri Strug made a heroic final vault despite torn ligaments in her left ankle as the U.S. women gymnasts clinched their first Olympic team gold medal.

2003, Massachusetts’ attorney general issued a report saying clergy members and others in the Boston Archdiocese had probably sexually abused more than 1,000 people over a period of six decades.

July 24:

1847, Mormon leader Brigham Young and his followers arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in present-day Utah.

1932, the “Bonus Army,” a group of thousands of WWI veterans and their supporters who gathered in Washington, D.C., to protest the U.S. government’s refusal to redeem cash bonus certificates given to the veterans for their service, clashed with D.C. police; two protesting veterans were shot and killed.

1969, the Apollo 11 astronauts — two of whom had been the first humans to set foot on the moon — splashed down safely in the Pacific.

July 25:

1866, Ulysses S. Grant was named General of the Army of the United States, the first officer to hold the rank.

1956, the Italian liner SS Andrea Doria collided with the Swedish passenger ship Stockholm off the New England coast late at night and began sinking; 51 people — 46 from the Andrea Doria, five from the Stockholm — were killed. (The Andrea Doria capsized and sank the following morning.)

1972, the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiment came to light as The Associated Press reported that for the previous four decades, the U.S. Public Health Service, in conjunction with the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, had been allowing poor, rural Black male patients with syphilis to go without treatment, even allowing more than 100 of them to die, as a way of studying the disease.

2010, the online whistleblower Wikileaks posted some 90,000 leaked U.S. military records that amounted to a blow-by-blow account of the Afghanistan war, including unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings, as well as covert operations against Taliban figures.

July 26:

1775, the Continental Congress established a post office and appointed Benjamin Franklin its postmaster general.

1948, President Truman issued Executive Order 9981, which desegregated the U.S. military.

1990, President George H.W. Bush signed the ADA, prohibiting discrimination based on mental or physical disabilities.

2020, a processional with the casket of the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Alabama, where Lewis and other civil rights marchers were beaten 55 years earlier.

July 27:

1789, President George Washington signed a measure establishing the Department of Foreign Affairs, forerunner of the Department of State.

1953, the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed at Panmunjom, ending three years of fighting on the Korean peninsula that killed an estimated 4 million people.

1974, the House Judiciary Committee voted 27-11 to adopt the first of three articles of impeachment against President Richard Nixon, charging he had personally engaged in a course of conduct designed to obstruct justice in the Watergate case.

1996, terror struck the Atlanta Olympics as a pipe bomb exploded at Centennial Olympic Park, directly killing one person and injuring 111. (Anti-government extremist Eric Rudolph later pleaded guilty to the bombing, exonerating security guard Richard Jewell, who had been wrongly suspected.)

— Associated Press