Thursday, July 21

This Day In History

• 1733   John Winthrop was granted the first honorary Doctor of Law Degree in the United States. The honor was bestowed on Mr. Winthrop by Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• 1831   Belgium became independent as Leopold I was proclaimed King of the Belgians.
• 1861   The first Battle of Bull Run was fought at Manassas, Va., resulting in a Confederate victory.
• 1873   The first train robbery in America was pulled off by Jesse James and his gang. They took $3,000 from the Rock Island Express at Adair, IA. Stick ’em up. And don’t try to grab my mask!
• 1899   Author Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Ill.
• 1899   Poet Hart Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio.
• 1930   The Veterans’ Administration of the United States was established this day.
• 1944   American forces landed on Guam during World War II.
• 1944   The Democratic National Convention in Chicago nominated Sen. Harry S. Truman to be vice president.
• 1949   The U.S. Senate ratified the North Atlantic Treaty.
• 1954   France surrendered North Vietnam to the Communists.
• 1955   During the Geneva summit, President Dwight D. Eisenhower presented his ''open skies'' proposal under which the United States and the Soviet Union would trade information on each other's military facilities.
• 1961   Capt. Virgil ''Gus'' Grissom became the second American to rocket into a sub-orbital pattern around the Earth, flying on the Liberty Bell 7.
• 1969   Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin ''Buzz'' Aldrin blasted off from the moon aboard the lunar module.
• 1980   Draft registration began in the United States for 19- and 20-year-old men.
• 1988   Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis accepted the Democratic presidential nomination at the party's convention in Atlanta.
• 1998   Astronaut Alan Shepard died at age 74.
• 1999   Navy divers found the bodies of John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, Carolyn, and sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette, in the wreckage of Kennedy's plane in the Atlantic Ocean off Martha's Vineyard.
• 2000   Special Counsel John C. Danforth concluded ''with 100 percent certainty'' that the federal government was innocent of wrongdoing in the siege that killed 80 members of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, in 1993.
• 2002   Telecommunications giant WorldCom Inc. filed for bankruptcy protection, about a month after disclosing it had inflated profits by nearly $4 billion through deceptive accounting.

Happy Birthday To

• 1899   Ernest (Miller) Hemingway (Pulitzer Prize [1953] & Nobel Prize-winning writer [1954]: The Old Man and the Sea, The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls; died July 2, 1961)
• 1920   Isaac Stern (concert violin impresario: soundtrack: Fiddler on the Roof; died Sep 22, 2001)
• 1924   Don Knotts (comedian, Emmy Award-winning actor: The Andy Griffith Show [1960-1961, 1961-1962, 1962-1963, 1965-1966, 1966-1967], Matlock, Three’s Company, The Don Knotts Show, The Steve Allen Show)
• 1938   Janet Reno (U.S. Attorney General 1993-2001)
• 1948   Cat Stevens (Stephen Demetre Georgiou, Muslim name: Yusuf Islam)