Today is Thursday, July 24, the 205th day of 2014. There are 160 days left in the year.
Today’s Highlight in History: On July 24, 1974, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that President
Richard Nixon had to turn over subpoenaed White House tape recordings to the Watergate special
prosecutor.
On this date:
In 1862, Martin Van Buren, the eighth president of the United States, and the first to have been born a
U.S. citizen, died at age 79 in Kinderhook, New York, the town where he was born in 1782.
In 1866, Tennessee became the first state to be readmitted to the Union after the Civil War.
In 1911, Yale University history professor Hiram Bingham III found the "Lost City of the
Incas," Machu Picchu, in Peru.
In 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne, which settled the boundaries of modern Turkey, was concluded in
Switzerland.
In 1937, the state of Alabama dropped charges against four of the nine young black men accused of raping
two white women in the "Scottsboro Case."
In 1952, President Harry S. Truman announced a settlement in a 53-day steel strike.
In 1959, during a visit to Moscow, Vice President Richard Nixon engaged in his famous "Kitchen
Debate" with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
In 1969, the Apollo 11 astronauts – two of whom had been the first men to set foot on the moon – splashed
down safely in the Pacific.
In 1987, Hulda Crooks, a 91-year-old mountaineer from California, became the oldest woman to conquer
Mount Fuji, Japan’s highest peak.
In 1998, a gunman burst into the U.S. Capitol, killing two police officers before being shot and
captured. (The shooter, Russell Eugene Weston Jr., is being held in a federal mental facility.)
In 2002, nine coal miners became trapped in a flooded tunnel of the Quecreek Mine in western
Pennsylvania; 77 hours later all nine were rescued.