There are 170 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On July 14, 2004, the Senate scuttled a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. (Forty-eight senators voted to advance the measure — 12 short of the 60 needed — and 50 voted to block it).
On this date:
In 1789, in an event symbolizing the start of the French Revolution, citizens of Paris stormed the Bastille prison and released the seven prisoners inside.
In 1798, Congress passed the Sedition Act, making it a federal crime to publish false, scandalous or malicious writing about the United States government.
In 1881, outlaw William H. Bonney Jr., alias “Billy the Kid,” was shot and killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett in Fort Sumner in present-day New Mexico.
In 1912, American folk singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie (“This Land Is Your Land”) was born in Okemah, Oklahoma.
In 1933, all German political parties, except the Nazi Party, were outlawed.
In 1945, Italy formally declared war on Japan, its former Axis partner during World War II.
In 1976, Jimmy Carter won the Democratic presidential nomination at the party’s convention in New York.
In 1980, the Republican national convention opened in Detroit, where nominee-apparent Ronald Reagan told a welcoming rally he and his supporters were determined to “make America great again.”
In 2009, disgraced financier Bernard Madoff arrived at the Butner Federal Correctional Complex in North Carolina to begin serving a 150-year sentence for his massive Ponzi scheme. (Madoff died in prison in April 2021.)
In 2015, world powers and Iran struck a deal to curb Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for relief from international sanctions.
In 2016, terror struck Bastille Day celebrations in the French Riviera city of Nice (nees) as a large truck plowed into a festive crowd, killing 86 people in an attack claimed by Islamic State extremists; the driver was shot dead by police.
In 2020,researchers reported that the first COVID-19 vaccine tested in the U.S. revved up people’s immune systems as scientists had hoped; the vaccine was developed by the National Institutes of Health and Moderna Inc. The federal government carried out its first execution in almost two decades, killing by lethal injection Daniel Lewis Lee, who’d been convicted of murdering an Arkansas family in a 1990s plot to build a whites-only nation in the Pacific Northwest.
