Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Wednesday, July 20

This Day In History

  • 1810   Colombia declared independence from Spain.
  • 1861   The Congress of the Confederate States began holding sessions in Richmond, Va.
  • 1868   Legislation that ordered U.S. tax stamps to be placed on all cigarette packs was passed this day.
  • 1871   British Columbia joined the confederation as a Canadian province.
  • 1881   Sioux Indian leader Sitting Bull, a fugitive since the Battle of the Little Big Horn, surrendered to federal troops.
  • 1917   The World War I draft lottery began.
  • 1942   The first detachment of the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps began basic training at Fort Des Moines, Iowa.
  • 1944   Adolf Hitler was only slightly wounded when a bomb planted by would-be assassins exploded at the German leader's Rastenburg headquarters.
  • 1944   President Franklin D. Roosevelt was nominated for an unprecedented fourth term of office at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
  • 1951   Jordan's King Abdullah Ibn Hussein was assassinated in Jerusalem.
  • 1976   America's Viking 1 robot spacecraft landed on Mars.
  • 1977   A flash flood hit Johnstown, Pa., killing 80 people and causing $350 million in damage.
  • 1990   A federal appeals court set aside Oliver North's Iran-Contra convictions.
  • 1992   Vaclav Havel, the playwright who led the Velvet Revolution against communism, stepped down as president of Czechoslovakia.
  • 1993   White House deputy counsel Vince Foster was found shot to death in a park near Washington in an apparent suicide.
  • 1994   Bosnian Serbs rejected an international peace plan sponsored by the United States, Russia, France, Britain and Germany.
  • 1997   Seven people were arrested after New York City police found scores of deaf Mexicans kept in slave-like conditions and forced to peddle trinkets for smugglers who had brought them to the United States.
  • 1999   After 38 years at the bottom of the Atlantic, astronaut Gus Grissom's Liberty Bell 7 Mercury capsule was lifted to the surface.
Happy Birthday To
  • 1919   Sir Edmund Hillary (explorer: first to climb Mt. Everest)
  • 1938   Diana Rigg (The Avengers)
  • 1938   Natalie Wood (Natasha Nikolaevna Gurdin)

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