| On this date in: |
| 1810 |
Colombia declared independence from Spain. |
| 1861 |
The Congress of the Confederate States began holding sessions in Richmond, Va. |
| 1871 |
British Columbia joined the confederation as a Canadian province. |
| 1881 |
Sioux Indian leader Sitting Bull surrendered to federal troops. |
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| AP Photo |
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| 1917 |
The World War I draft lottery began. |
| 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 at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. |
| 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. |
| 1993 |
White House deputy counsel Vince Foster was found shot to death in a park near Washington, D.C., in an apparent suicide. |
| 1999 |
After 38 years at the bottom of the Atlantic, astronaut Gus Grissom’s Liberty Bell 7 Mercury capsule was recovered. |
| 2007 |
The Senate Judiciary Committee voted almost totally along party lines, 13-6, to approve Elena Kagan to be the Supreme Court’s fourth female justice. |
