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Today in History: Phelps sets Olympic medal record

Today in History: Phelps sets Olympic medal record

Boston Globe7 days ago
In 1715, a fleet of Spanish ships carrying gold, silver, and jewelry sank during a hurricane off the east Florida coast; of some 2,500 crew members, more than 1,000 died.
In 1775, 250 years ago, General George Washington ordered Major Benjamin Tupper to take 300 men and destroy Boston Light house. The men overwhelmed the British but the tides left them stranded on the island and vulnerable to British reinforcements. Nonetheless, the soldiers defeated the British a second time on the Little Brewster Island before returning to the mainland.
In 1777, the 19-year-old Marquis de Lafayette received a commission as major general in the Continental Army by the Second Continental Congress.
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In 1919, Germany's Weimar Constitution was adopted by the republic's National Assembly.
In 1945, Pierre Laval, premier of the pro-Nazi Vichy government in France, surrendered to US authorities in Austria; he was turned over to France, which later tried and executed him.
In 1957, the Distant Early Warning Line, a system of radar stations designed to detect Soviet bombers approaching North America, went into operation.
In 1964, the US lunar probe Ranger 7 took the first close-up images of the moon's surface.
In 1971, Apollo 15 crew members David Scott and James Irwin became the first astronauts to use a lunar rover on the surface of the moon.
In 1972, vice-presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton withdrew from the Democratic ticket with George McGovern following disclosures that Eagleton had received electroshock therapy to treat clinical depression.
Also that year, Massachusetts Correction Officer Alfred Baranowski and Correction Officer James Souza were shot and killed during an escape attempt by a convicted murderer from the Norfolk Prison. The state's maximum-security facility in Lancaster was named after them.
In 1973, Delta Air Lines Flight 723 undershot the runway in Logan International Airport amid low visibility and collided with a sea wall. The crash, the worst commercial aviation disaster in New England, would eventually take the lives of all 89 people on board.
In 1991, President George H.W. Bush and Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) in Moscow.
In 2012, at the Summer Olympics in London, swimmer Michael Phelps won his 19th Olympic medal, becoming the most decorated Olympian of all time. (He would finish his career with 28 total Olympic medals, 23 of them gold.)
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In 2020, a federal appeals court overturned the death sentence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, saying the judge who oversaw the case didn't adequately screen jurors for potential biases. (The Supreme Court reimposed the sentence in 2022.)
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Today in History: The atomic bombing of Hiroshima
Today in History: The atomic bombing of Hiroshima

Boston Globe

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  • Boston Globe

Today in History: The atomic bombing of Hiroshima

In 1825, Upper Peru became the autonomous republic of Bolivia. In 1890, at Auburn Prison in Auburn, New York, William Kemmler became the first person to be executed via the electric chair. Advertisement In 1926, Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim across the English Channel. In 1942, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands became the first reigning queen to address a joint session of Congress, telling lawmakers that despite Nazi occupation, her people's motto remained, 'No surrender.' In 1945, during World War II, the US B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, resulting in an estimated 140,000 deaths. In 1962, Jamaica gained independence from the United Kingdom after 300 years of British rule. In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, prohibiting racial discrimination in voting. In 1991, the World Wide Web made its public debut as a means of accessing webpages over the Internet. In 2011, insurgents shot down a US military helicopter during fighting in eastern Afghanistan, killing 30 Americans, most of them belonging to the same elite Navy commando unit that had killed Osama bin Laden; seven Afghan commandos also died. Advertisement

Hidden history underneath Carpenters' Hall reveals Founding Fathers' favorite snack
Hidden history underneath Carpenters' Hall reveals Founding Fathers' favorite snack

CBS News

timea day ago

  • CBS News

Hidden history underneath Carpenters' Hall reveals Founding Fathers' favorite snack

A preservation project at Carpenters' Hall led to a historic discovery that revealed our Founding Fathers' favorite snack. In this day and age, oysters are seen as a delicacy, but it wasn't always like that. "They were like the French fries of the 18th century," Carpenters' Hall Executive Director Michael Norris said. "People had them for breakfast, and there were vendors on the street, taverns sold them." "Philadelphia was the largest hub for oysters in the United States in the late 1880s," Fishtown Seafood Owner Bryan Szeliga said. "About 800 million oysters passed through Philadelphia either for local consumption or through wholesale and into other markets." The shells of those hundreds of millions of oysters had to go somewhere. So, back then, people got creative. "They just had so many shells," Norris said. "They didn't know what to do with them. Oyster shells were used to pave the streets and were used as ballasts on ships." Now, shards of oysters can be found all throughout the city, right under our feet, including at Carpenters' Hall. The historic brick building in Old City is known as the meeting place for the First Continental Congress back in 1774. In 2023, the site underwent a preservation project that led to the excavation of the building's perimeter by archeologists. "This is the area during that excavation when they found some pottery shards, some shards of oyster shells," Norris said. "George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson wrote about their oyster consumption, and many of those folks met here." Although oysters were a staple during the country's revolutionary era, the shellfish's history goes back well before then. "Our European settlers learned about oyster culture from the Native Americans who, obviously, had been harvesting for centuries long before we showed up," Norris said. In light of National Oyster Day on Tuesday, organizers welcomed people of all ages to Carpenters' Hall for the Shells of Liberty Oyster Bash. The event was in partnership with Carpenters' Hall, Fishtown Seafood and Triple Bottom Brewing. Aside from enjoying drinks and oysters, proceeds of the event went to the Delaware Estuary to help educate the community on the role oysters play in our environment. "They're really an important part of marine ecosystems environmentally because they help filter the water and keep things clean," Norris said. "We thought it would be really fun to celebrate the day and to recognize a product that was so pervasive and such an important part of colonial culture and colonial cuisine." It's a taste of history that's connecting us even centuries later.

What to know about the Titan sub and its tragic final dive to the Titanic

timea day ago

What to know about the Titan sub and its tragic final dive to the Titanic

The Titan submersible was crushed by intense water pressure beneath the North Atlantic Ocean in the summer of 2023. A catastrophic implosion instantly killed the four passengers and pilot, Stockton Rush, who was also the CEO of the company that owned the vessel. Two years later, the U.S. Coast Guard released a lengthy report saying the disaster could have been prevented, but deeply flawed safety procedures and efforts to avoid oversight had effectively doomed the vessel and all aboard. Things to know about Titan: Titan had been making voyages to the Titanic shipwreck since 2021. Owned by OceanGate, a company based in Washington state, the final dive came on June 18, 2023. The submersible was reported overdue that afternoon, and ships, planes and equipment were rushed to the scene about 435 miles (700 kilometers) south of St. John's, Newfoundland. The Titanic rests on the ocean floor about 12,500 feet (3,800 meters) below the surface. Experts had cautioned that the submersible's hull could implode under intense pressure at extreme depths. OceanGate touted Titan's roomier cylinder-shaped cabin made of a carbon-fiber, although experts say it was a departure from the sphere-shaped cabins made of titanium used by most submersibles. A sphere is a 'perfect shape' because water pressure is exerted equally on all areas, said Chris Roman, a professor at the University of Rhode Island's Graduate School of Oceanography. Titan had made more than two dozen deep-sea dives, which put repeated stress on the hull, said Jasper Graham-Jones, an associate professor of mechanical and marine engineering at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom. Investigators also found that Titan was stored outdoors over the Canadian winter, where its hull was exposed to temperature fluctuations that compromised the integrity of the vessel. The water pressure at the Titanic is roughly 400 atmospheres or 6,000 pounds per square inch. Arun Bansil, a Northeastern University physics professor, likened the pressure to the force of a "whale biting on somebody.' 'The passengers probably would have had no idea what happened,' Bansil said in 2023. OceanGate had a culture of downplaying, ignoring and even falsifying key safety information to improve its reputation and dodge scrutiny from regulators, Coast Guard investigators found. OceanGate ignored 'red flags' and had a 'toxic workplace culture,' while its mission was hindered by lack of domestic and international framework for submersible operations, the report says. Numerous OceanGate employees have come forward since the implosion to support those claims. 'By strategically creating and exploiting regulatory confusion and oversight challenges, OceanGate was ultimately able to operate TITAN completely outside of the established deep-sea protocols,' the report found. In addition to Rush, the implosion killed French explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, British adventurer Hamish Harding and two members of a prominent Pakistani family, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood.

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