1969, Apollo 11 launched from Cape Kennedy in Florida on the first manned mission to the surface of the moon.
1999, John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, Carolyn, and her sister, Lauren Bessette, died when their single-engine plane, piloted by Kennedy, plunged into the Atlantic Ocean near Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts.
July 17:
1862, during the Civil War, Congress approved the Second Confiscation Act, which declared that all slaves taking refuge behind Union lines were to be set free.
1918, Russia’s Czar Nicholas II and his family were executed by the Bolsheviks.
1944, during World War II, 320 men, two-thirds of them African Americans, were killed when a pair of ammunition ships exploded at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in California.
1981, 114 people were killed when a pair of suspended walkways above the lobby of the Kansas City Hyatt Regency Hotel collapsed during a tea dance.
July 18:
1536, the English Parliament passed an act declaring the authority of the pope void in England.
1863, during the Civil War, Union troops spearheaded by the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, made up of Black soldiers, charged Confederate-held Fort Wagner on Morris Island, South Carolina. The Confederates were able to repel the Northerners, who suffered heavy losses; the 54th’s commander, Col. Robert Gould Shaw, was among those killed.
1947, President Harry S. Truman signed a Presidential Succession Act which placed the speaker of the House and the Senate president pro tempore next in the line of succession after the vice president.
1976, at the Summer Olympics in Montreal, Nadia Comaneci of Romania became the first gymnast to receive a perfect score of 10 from Olympic judges for her performance on the uneven bars.
July 19:
1812, during the War of 1812, the First Battle of Sackets Harbor in Lake Ontario resulted in an American victory as U.S. naval forces repelled a British attack.
1969, Apollo 11 and its astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins, went into orbit around the moon.
1993, President Bill Clinton announced a policy allowing gays to serve in the military under a compromise dubbed “don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue.”
2018, a duck boat packed with tourists capsized and sank in high winds on a lake in the tourist town of Branson, Missouri, killing 17 people.
— Associated Press
