Today in History
Today is Friday, June 30, the 181st day of 2023. There are 184 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History:
On June 30, 1982, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution expired, having failed to receive the required number of ratifications for its adoption, despite having its seven-year deadline extended by three years.
On this date:
In 1918, labor activist and socialist Eugene V. Debs was arrested in Cleveland, charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 for a speech he’d made two weeks earlier denouncing U.S. involvement in World War I. (Debs was sentenced to prison and disenfranchised for life.)
In 1921, President Warren G. Harding nominated former President William Howard Taft to be chief justice of the United States, succeeding the late Edward Douglass White.
In 1934, Adolf Hitler launched his “blood purge” of political and military rivals in Germany in what came to be known as “The Night of the Long Knives.”
In 1958, the U.S. Senate passed the Alaska statehood bill by a vote of 64-20.
In 1971, the Supreme Court ruled, 6-3, that the government could not prevent The New York Times or The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers. A Soviet space mission ended in tragedy when three cosmonauts aboard Soyuz 11 were found dead of asphyxiation inside their capsule after it had returned to Earth.
In 1985, 39 American hostages from a hijacked TWA jetliner were freed in Beirut after being held 17 days.
In 1986, the Supreme Court, in Bowers v. Hardwick, ruled 5-4 that states could outlaw homosexual acts between consenting adults (however, the nation’s highest court effectively reversed this decision in 2003 in Lawrence v. Texas).
In 1994, the U.S. Figure Skating Association stripped Tonya Harding of the national championship and banned her for life for her role in the attack on rival Nancy Kerrigan.
In 2009, American soldier Pfc. Bowe R. Bergdahl went missing from his base in eastern Afghanistan, and was later confirmed to have been captured by insurgents after walking away from his post. (Bergdahl was released on May 31, 2014 in exchange for five Taliban detainees; he pleaded guilty to desertion and misbehavior before the enemy, but was spared a prison sentence by a military judge.)
In 2016, saying it was the right thing to do, Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced that transgender people would be allowed to serve openly in the U.S. military, ending one of the last bans on service in the armed forces.
In 2020, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves signed a landmark bill retiring the last state flag bearing the Confederate battle emblem. Boston’s arts commission voted unanimously to remove a statue depicting a freed slave kneeling at Abraham Lincoln’s feet.
Ten years ago: Nineteen elite firefighters known as members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots were killed battling a wildfire northwest of Phoenix after a change in wind direction pushed the flames back toward their position. Addressing students at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, President Barack Obama declared that the future of the young and growing continent still rested in Nelson Mandela’s vision for equality and opportunity. Inbee Park won the U.S. Women’s Open in Southampton, New York, for her third straight major of the year.
Five years ago: Hundreds of thousands of people gathered for rallies and marches in hundreds of locations around the country, demanding an end to the separation of immigrant families who cross into the United States. In Portland, Oregon, skirmishes between right-wing and left-wing groups left four people hospitalized. In the Iranian city of Khorramshahr, an initially peaceful protest over water shortages turned violent as police and protesters clashed.
One year ago: Ketanji Brown Jackson was sworn in to the Supreme Court, shattering a glass ceiling as the first Black woman on the nation’s highest court. The 51-year-old Jackson became the court’s 116th justice, taking the place of a justice she once worked for, Stephen Breyer, whose retirement took effect as she took over. The same day, in a blow to the fight against climate change, the Supreme Court limited how the nation’s main anti-air pollution law could be used to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. By a 6-3 vote, the court said that the Clean Air Act did not give the Environmental Protection Agency broad authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants that contribute to global warming. West Coast powerhouses USC and UCLA announced they were planning to leave the Pac-12 for the Big Ten Conference in a surprising move that promised to lead to a major realignment of college sports.
Today’s Birthdays: Actor Lea Massari is 90. Actor Nancy Dussault (doo-SOH’) is 87. Songwriter Tony Hatch is 84. Singer Glenn Shorrock is 79. Actor Leonard Whiting is 73. Jazz musician Stanley Clarke is 72. Actor David Garrison is 71. Rock musician Hal Lindes (Dire Straits) is 70. Actor-comedian David Alan Grier is 67. Actor Vincent D’Onofrio is 64. Actor Deirdre Lovejoy is 61. Actor Rupert Graves is 60. Former boxer Mike Tyson is 57. Actor Peter Outerbridge is 57. Rock musician Tom Drummond (Better Than Ezra) is 54. Actor-comedian Tony Rock (TV: “Living Biblically”) is 54. Actor Brian Bloom is 53. Actor Monica Potter is 52. Actor Molly Parker is 51. Actor Rick Gonzalez is 44. Actor Tom Burke is 42. Actor Lizzy Caplan is 41. Actor Susannah Flood is 41. Rock musician James Adam Shelley (American Authors) is 40. Country singer Cole Swindell is 40. R&B singer Fantasia is 39. Olympic gold medal swimmer Michael Phelps is 38. Actor Sean Marquette (TV: “The Goldbergs”) is 35.
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