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Today in History July 24
1487 – Citizens of Leeuwarden, Netherlands, strike against a ban on foreign beer.
1567 – Mary, Queen of Scots, is forced to abdicate and replaced by her 1-year-old son James VI.
1847 – After 17 months of travel, Brigham Young leads 148 Mormon pioneers into Salt Lake Valley, resulting in the establishment of Salt Lake City.
1847 – Richard March Hoe, American inventor, patented the rotary-type printing press.
1866 – Reconstruction: Tennessee becomes the first U.S. state to be readmitted to the Union following the American Civil War.
1915 – The passenger ship SS Eastland capsizes while tied to a dock in the Chicago River. A total of 844 passengers and crew are killed in the largest loss of life disaster from a single shipwreck on the Great Lakes.
1922 – The draft of the British Mandate of Palestine was formally confirmed by the Council of the League of Nations; it came into effect on September 26 1923.
1923 – The Treaty of Lausanne (1923), settling the boundaries of modern Turkey, is signed in Switzerland by Greece, Bulgaria and other countries that fought in World War I.
1929 – The Kellogg-Briand Pact, renouncing war as an instrument of foreign policy, goes into effect (it is first signed in Paris on August 27, 1928, by most leading world powers).
1935 – The Dust Bowl heat wave reaches its peak, sending temperatures to 109 °F (43 °C) in Chicago and 104 °F (40 °C) in Milwaukee.
“FDR’s New Deal attacked the crisis on the Great Plains on a number of fronts. The Farm Security Administration provided emergency relief, promoted soil conservation, resettled farmers on more productive land, and aided migrant farm workers who had been forced off their land. The Soil Conservation Service helped farmers enrich their soil and stem erosion. The Taylor Grazing Act regulated grazing on overused public ranges. Roosevelt’s Shelterbelt Project, created by executive order, fought wind erosion by marshalling farmers, Civilian Conservation Corps boys, and Works Progress Administration workers in an enormous effort to plant over 200 million trees in a belt running from Bismarck, North Dakota, to Amarillo, Texas. This immense windbreak moderated the Dust Bowl’s destructive winds. The Shelterbelt Project remains one of the great environmental success stories of our time.” In his fireside chat of September 6, 1936, FDR said this about the drought:
I saw drought devastation in nine states.
I talked with families who had lost their wheat crop, lost their corn crop, lost their livestock, lost the water in their well, lost their garden and come through to the end of the summer without one dollar of cash resources, facing a winter without feed or food-facing a planting season without seed to put in the ground.
I shall never forget the fields of wheat so blasted by heat that they cannot be harvested. I shall never forget field after field of corn stunted, earless and stripped of leaves, for what the sun left the grasshoppers took. I saw brown pastures which would not keep a cow on fifty acres. (wikipedia)
1950 – Cape Canaveral Air Force Station begins operations with the launch of a Bumper rocket.
1959 – At the opening of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev have a “Kitchen Debate”.
1969 – Apollo program: Apollo 11 splashes down safely in the Pacific Ocean.
1974 – Watergate scandal: The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that President Richard Nixon did not have the authority to withhold subpoenaed White House tapes and they order him to surrender the tapes to the Watergate special prosecutor.
2013 – A high-speed train derails in Spain rounding a curve with an 80 km/h (50 mph) speed limit at 190 km/h (120 mph), killing 78 passengers.
2014 – Air Algérie Flight 5017 loses contact with air traffic controllers 50 minutes after takeoff. It was travelling between Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso and Algiers. The wreckage is later found in Mali. All 116 people onboard are killed.
Births
1468 – Catherine of Saxony, Archduchess of Austria (d. 1524)
1574 – Thomas Platter the Younger, Swiss physician and author (d. 1628)
1802 – Alexandre Dumas, French novelist and playwright (d. 1870)
1897 – Amelia Earhart, American pilot and author (d. 1937)
1919 – Kenneth S. Kleinknecht, NASA manager (d. 2007)
1920 – Bella Abzug, American lawyer and politician (d. 1998)
1935 – Mel Ramos, American painter, illustrator, and academic
1936 – Ruth Buzzi, American actress and comedian
1947 – Peter Serkin, American pianist and educator
Deaths
759 – Oswulf, king of Northumbria
946 – Muhammad ibn Tughj al-Ikhshid, Egyptian ruler (b. 882)
1862 – Martin Van Buren, 8th President of the United States (b. 1782)
1980 – Peter Sellers, English actor and comedian (b. 1925)
2012 – Robert Ledley, American physiologist and physicist, invented the CT scanner (b. 1926)
2015 – Ingrid Sischy, South African-American journalist and critic (b. 1952
Sourced from various internet sites.
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