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Ray’s This Day in History – July 28
| 1540 | 1586 Sir Thomas Harriot introduces potatoes to Europe
1588 Spanish Armada sails from Spain to overthrow England’s Queen Elizabeth I | |
| 1615 | French explorer Samuel de Champlain discovers Lake Huron on his seventh voyage to the New World. |
July 28, 1727: Melancholy and stiff young preacher Jonathan Edwards marries Sarah Pierrepont, a lively 17-year-old. The union proved happy and is melancholy vanished. Together the couple produced produced 11 children, six of who were born on Sunday s. This caused a bit of a scandal, because people then believed children were born the same weekday they were conceived. Nonetheless, people admired the marriage, including George Whitefield, who declared, “A sweeter couple I have not seen”
1750 The great baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach died.
1776 Sargent and Hutchinson arrive at Horn’s Hook, New York
Colonel Paul Dudley Sargent with the 16th Continental Regiment and Colonel Israel Hutchinson with his 27th Continental Regiment, both from Massachusetts, as well as several British ships, arrive at Horn’s Hook, New York, on this day in 1776.
Horn’s Hook was first intended to house nine guns as a Patriot battery to defend Manhattan in February 1776. The battery, or fort, stood near the modern-day intersection of 89th Street and East End Avenue, opposite Ward’s Island and Hell’s Gate. After gathering at Horn’s Hook, the Massachusetts regiments went on to Long Island, where they suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of brothers Admiral Richard and General William Howe. The campaign culminated in their retreat from Brooklyn Heights on Long Island back to Horn’s Hook in Manhattan on August 27, one month after their initial arrival.
The Massachusetts regiments exchanged continual fire with a British fort a short distance across the water from Horn’s Hook in Queens for the 10 days between the Patriots’ retreat from Brooklyn Heights and the complete British takeover of Manhattan Island.
After the British took Manhattan and fire ravaged the city in September 1776, the Redcoats restored Horn’s Hook, adding batteries, palisades (iron stakes) and a palisade-protected blockhouse. Following the war, Archibald Gracie leveled the fort and, in 1794, built a Federal-style mansion on the site. Gracie’s country house, with its view of the East River five miles north of New York City, has since been absorbed into the Manhattan metropolis and has served as the official residence of the city’s mayors since Fiorello H. LaGuardia made it his home in 1942.
1794 Robespierre, one of the leading figures of the French Revolution, was sent to the guillotine while the common people cheered.
1814 Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin elope to France
On July 28, 1814, Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley elopes with 17-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin on this day, despite the fact that he’s already married.
Shelley, the heir to his wealthy grandfather’s estate, was expelled from Oxford when he refused to acknowledge authorship of a controversial essay. He eloped with his first wife, Harriet Westbrook, the daughter of a tavern owner, in 1811. However, just a few years later, Shelley fell in love with the young Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, daughter of a prominent reformer and early feminist writer. Shelley and Godwin fled to Europe, marrying after Shelley’s wife committed suicide in 1816.
Shelley’s inheritance did not pay all the bills, and the couple spent much of their married life abroad, fleeing Shelley’s creditors. While living in Geneva, the Shelleys and their dear friend Lord Byron challenged each other to write a compelling ghost story. Only Mary Shelley finished hers, later publishing the story as Frankenstein. Yep, the same Frankenstein so many movies were produced to scare people out of their wits!
The Shelleys had five children but only one lived to adulthood. After Shelley drowned in a sailing accident when Mary Shelley was only 24, she edited two volumes of his works. She lived on a small stipend from her father-in-law, Lord Shelley, until her surviving son inherited his fortune and title in 1844. She died at the age of 53. Although she was a respected writer for many years, only Frankenstein and her journals are still widely read or seen in scary movies.
On this day in 1864, at the Battle of Ezra Church, Georgia, Confederates under General John Bell Hood make a third attempt to break General William T. Sherman’s hold on Atlanta. Like the first two, this attack failed, destroying the Confederate Army of Tennessee’s offensive capabilities.
Hood had replaced Joseph Johnston as commander of the Army of Tennessee on July 18, 1864, because Johnston had failed to keep Sherman away from Atlanta. Upon assuming command of the army, Hood quickly scrapped Johnston’s defensive strategy and attacked Sherman, first on July 20 at the Battle of Peachtree Creek, and then on July 22 at the Battle of Atlanta. Both attacks failed, but that did not deter Hood from making another attempt to break the Union hold on the important Southern city.
When Sherman sent General Oliver O. Howard southeast of Atlanta to cut the Macon and Western Railroad, one of the remaining supply lines, Hood sent Stephen D. Lee’s corps to block the move. Lee attacked at Ezra Church, but the battle did not go as planned for the Confederates. Instead of striking the Union flank, Lee’s corps hit the Union center, where the Yankee troops were positioned behind barricades made from logs and pews taken from the church. Throughout the afternoon, Lee made several attacks on the Union lines. Each was turned back, and Lee was not able to get around the Union flank.
The battle was costly for an army that was already outnumbered. Lee lost 3,000 men to the Union’s 630. More important, Hood lost his offensive capability. For the next month, he could do no more than sit in trenches around Atlanta and wait for Sherman to deal him the knockout blow.
| 1866 | Much to the delight of millions of children, Beatrix Potter, children’s author who wrote The Tale of Peter Rabbit and many other books I deeply enjoyed in my childhood, was born. Also on this date in 1866 the Metric system became a legal measurement system in US |
Following its ratification by the necessary three-quarters of U.S. states, the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing to African Americans citizenship and all its privileges, is officially adopted into the U.S. Constitution on July 28, 1868.
Two years after the Civil War, the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 divided the South into five military districts, where new state governments, based on universal manhood equality, were to be established. Thus began the period known as Radical Reconstruction, which saw the 14th Amendment, which had been passed by Congress in 1866, ratified in July 1868. The amendment resolved pre-Civil War questions of African American citizenship by stating that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States…are citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside.” The amendment then reaffirmed the privileges and rights of all citizens, and granted all these citizens the “equal protection of the laws.”
In the decades after its adoption, the equal protection clause was cited by a number of African American activists who argued that racial segregation denied them the equal protection of law. However, in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that states could constitutionally provide segregated facilities for African Americans, so long as they were equal to those afforded white persons. The Plessy v. Ferguson decision, which announced federal toleration of the so-called “separate but equal” doctrine, was eventually used to justify segregating all public facilities, including railroad cars, restaurants, hospitals, and schools. However, “colored” facilities were never equal to their white counterparts, and African Americans suffered through decades of debilitating discrimination in the South and elsewhere. In 1954, Plessy v. Ferguson was finally struck down by the Supreme Court in its ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.
July 28, 1883, Shocks triggered by the volcano Epomeo on the Isle of Ischia, Italy, destroyed 1,200 houses at Casamicciola, killing 2,000 Italians.
July 28, 1896 – the city of Miami, Florida, was incorporated.
| July 28, 1898 | Spain, through the offices of the French embassy in Washington, D.C., requests peace terms in its war with the United States. |
I’m glad this happened before I was born so I could take full advantage of it. Way back on July 28, 1900, Louis Lassing in Connecticut created the first hamburger.
Before the electronic microphone became commonplace in the 1920s, the one quality that was required of every professional singer in every musical genre was a talent for vocal projection— that is, the ability to make oneself heard over one’s instrumental accompaniment in a live or a recorded performance. Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, for example—two of the greatest vocal stylists of the 20th century—probably would never have made their livings as singers had they been born just a decade or two earlier, when the ability to sing not just well but loudly was an absolute requirement. The man who paved the way for them and for every quietly emotive singer to follow was the first of the great crooners, Rudy Vallée—the first musical superstar to make a virtue of his relative vocal weakness.
Born Hubert Prior Vallée in Island Pond, Vermont, on this day in 1901, Rudy Vallée was a transformative figure in 20th-century popular music and one of the most popular all-around entertainers of his day or any other.
Hubert Vallée became Rudy Vallée at the University of Maine, where his classmates began calling the young saxophone player “Rudy” in honor of the then-famous saxophonist Rudy Wiedoft, whose records Vallée played incessantly. After a two-year stint as a member of the house band at London’s Savoy Hotel in the mid-1920s, Vallée returned to the United States and attended Yale, where he would earn a philosophy degree and form his first band. It was as bandleader of Rudy Vallée and the Connecticut Yankees that he would become a star, but only after taking over the singing duties from a departed vocalist in the late 1920s.
Vallée’s voice was a thin tenor that was barely audible from the stage without the help of an electric microphone or, when no microphone was available, his trademark handheld megaphone. Vallée’s good looks and suave demeanor brought legions of devoted female fans to his live appearances, however, and his soft voice proved a natural fit for the radio, which was then exploding in popularity. Vallée and his band signed their first recording contract in 1928, and Vallée was given his first radio show, The Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour, the following year.
On the strength of his radio shows and of low-price issues like “The Stein Song” (1930), which sold well even amid a recording industry-wide slump during the Great Depression, Vallée would be one of the most successful recording artists of the 1930s.
His final hit record would come in 1943 with a reissue of his 1928 version of “As Time Goes By,” then popular due to the film Casablanca. Over the next four decades, however, Vallée would remain a fixture on television, in films and on Broadway, where his role in How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying marked a late-career triumph.
Born on this day in 1901, Rudy Vallée died in Hollywood, California, on July 3, 1986 at the age of 85.
| 1907 | Much to the delight of millions of homemakers, Earl Silas Tupper, founder of Tupperware, was born. |
On July 28, 1914, one month to the day after Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife were killed by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, Austria-Hungary immediately declared war on Serbia, effectively beginning the First World War.
“My darling one and beautiful, everything tends towards catastrophe and collapse,” British naval official Winston Churchill wrote to his wife at midnight on July 29. He was proven right over the next several days.
On August 1, after its demands for Russia to halt mobilization met with defiance, Germany declared war on Russia. Russia’s ally, France, ordered its own general mobilization that same day, and on August 3, France and Germany declared war on each other. The German army’s planned invasion of neutral Belgium, announced on August 4, prompted Britain to declare war on Germany. Thus, in the summer of 1914, the major powers in the Western world—with the exception of the United States and Italy, both of which declared their neutrality, at least for a little while —flung themselves headlong into the First World War.
July 28, 1914 – A brand-new dance called the Foxtrot was revealed for the very first time at the New Amsterdam Roof Garden in New York City. Its creator was Harry Fox.
1915 – The United States military invaded Haiti and stayed there until 1924.
On that same day in 1915, 10,000 blacks marched on Fifth Avenue in New York City protesting lynchings. America was a very uncivilized nation at that time., And many would shorten that sentence and say America IS a very uncivilized nation as far as Blacks are concerned.
| 1920 | The notorious bandit Pancho Villa surrenders to the Mexican government. |
Unlike some Indian agents of the later 19th century, James McLaughlin genuinely liked and respected the Indian people. His wife was half Sioux, and she taught her husband to speak her native language reasonably well. In 1871, this valuable skill won McLaughlin a position at the Devils Lake Indian Agency in Dakota Territory and he eventually became the chief agent.
At Devils Lake, McLaughlin gained a reputation for fair and sympathetic treatment of Indians. However, like most Indian agents of the day, McLaughlin believed that his mission was to “civilize” the Indians by forcing them to adopt white ways. McLaughlin viewed traditional Indian practices like the Sun Dance and buffalo hunting as obstacles to the inevitable assimilation of the Native Americans into white society. So, while he worked hard to improve Indian living conditions, he simultaneously tried to stamp out their culture by promoting the use of English and the adoption of sedentary farming.
In 1881, McLaughlin was transferred to the larger Sioux reservation at Standing Rock, South Dakota. Two years later, the great Sioux Chief Sitting Bull was assigned to the reservation. McLaughlin worried about Sitting Bull. The chief was infamous for his role in the defeat of Custer’s 7th Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876. He was also among the last of the Sioux to accept confinement to a reservation, and his dislike for white culture remained obvious.
For several years, McLaughlin and Sitting Bull enjoyed a strained but peaceful relationship. In 1890, however, a popular religious movement known as the Ghost Dance swept through the Standing Rock reservation. The Ghost Dancers believed that an apocalyptic day was approaching when all whites would be wiped out, the buffalo would return, and the Indians could return to their traditional ways. McLaughlin wrongly suspected that Sitting Bull was a leader of the Ghost Dance movement.
In December 1890, he ordered the arrest of Sitting Bull, believing this might calm the tense situation on the reservation. Unfortunately, during the arrest, a fight broke out and McLaughlin’s policemen killed Sitting Bull. The murder only intensified the climate of fear and mistrust which contributed to the tragic massacre of 146 Indians by U.S. soldiers at Wounded Knee later that month.
In 1895, McLaughlin moved to Washington, D.C., where he became an inspector for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He eventually became familiar with Indians all around the nation, leading him to write a 1910 memoir entitled, My Friend the Indian. He died in Washington in on July 28, 1923, at the age of 81 and was buried at the South Dakota reservation town that bears his name.
On July 28, 1923, the prominent Indian agent James McLaughlin died in Washington, D.C.
On this day in 1929, President John F. Kennedy’s beautiful and popular wife, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, was born into a prominent New York family. Jacqueline, or “Jackie” as she was called, grew up an avid horsewoman and reader.
In 1951, after graduating from George Washington University, Jackie toured Europe with her sister. That fall, she returned to the America to begin her first job as the Washington Times-Herald‘s “Inquiring Camera Girl.” Her assignment was to roam the streets of Washington, D.C., asking strangers “man on the street” questions and then snapping their picture for publication.
Shortly after her return to the capital, at a dinner party in Georgetown, she met a young, handsome senator from Massachusetts named John F. Kennedy. They dated over the next two years, and in May 1953, Kennedy proposed. Jackie accepted and the couple married on September 12, 1953, at St. Mary’s Church in Newport, Rhode Island. The Kennedys then settled in Washington, D.C., where Kennedy engulfed himself with his political career.
He served as a senator from Massachusetts from 1953 until he was elected president of the United States in 1961. At the time, he and Jackie were the youngest couple ever to reside in the White House.
The couple presented a public facade of a happy marriage–the general public did not know of Kennedy’s affairs with other women–and Jackie was a dedicated wife and civic-minded first lady. She raised two children in the White House and restored the building to historic specifications. She was a popular celebrity and style icon for women around the world. On a trip to France in 1961, President Kennedy once quipped “I’m the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.”
The most memorable and tragic images of Jackie Kennedy were captured on film on November 22, 1963, immediately after her husband was shot while the couple was riding in an open-car motorcade through the city of Dallas, Texas. A home-movie camera caught a frantic Jackie scrambling over the back seat of the car and onto the trunk, where it appeared that she tried to retrieve a portion of Kennedy’s brain. Later that day, the press photographers snapped Jackie as she stood–shocked, stoic and solemn in a blood-stained suit–next to Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson as he took the oath of office en route to Washington on Air Force One.
July 28, 1931, Congress makes “The Star-Spangled Banner” our 2nd national anthem
Also on this day in 1931 the Chicago White Sox score 11 runs in the 8th inning to beat the New York Yankees 14-12.
During the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover ordered the U.S. Army under General Douglas MacArthur to evict by force the Bonus Marchers from the nation’s capital.
Two months before, the so-called “Bonus Expeditionary Force,” a group of some 1,000 World War I veterans seeking cash payments for their veterans’ bonus certificates, had arrived in Washington, D.C. Most of the marchers were unemployed veterans in desperate financial straits and the government absolutely owed that money to them.
In June, other veteran groups spontaneously made their way to the nation’s capital, swelling the Bonus Marchers to nearly 20,000 strong. Camping in vacant government buildings and in open fields made available by District of Columbia Police Chief Pelham D. Glassford, they demanded passage of the veterans’ payment bill introduced by Representative Wright Patman.
While awaiting a vote on the issue, the veterans conducted themselves in an orderly and peaceful fashion, and on June 15 the Patman bill passed in the House of Representatives. However, two days later, its defeat in the Senate stunned and greatly angered the marchers.
In an increasingly tense situation, the federal government provided money for the protesters’ trip home, but 2,000 refused the offer and continued to protest. On July 28, President Herbert Hoover ordered the army to evict them forcibly. General MacArthur’s men set their camps on fire and the veterans were driven from the city. Hoover, increasingly regarded as insensitive to the needs of the nation’s many poor, Hoover and MacArthur were greatly criticized by the public and press for the severity of their response.
1933 – Ruby Vallee received the very first singing telegram ever sent to anyone.
On July 28, 1942, the Nazis murder 10,000 Jews in one day in Minsk, Russia.
On this day in 1943, the worst British bombing raid on Hamburg, Germany, and so far during the Second World War, virtually set in certain the city on fire, killing 42,000 German civilians. Hamburg was the major producer of munitions for Germany.
On July 24, British bombers launched Operation Gomorrah, repeated bombing raids against Hamburg and its industrial and munitions plants. Sortie after sortie dropped fire from the sky, as thousands of tons of incendiary bombs destroyed tens of thousands of lives, buildings, and acreage. But the night of the 28th saw destruction unique in more than three years of bomb attacks: In just 43 minutes, 2,326 tons of bombs were dropped, creating a firestorm (a word that entered English parlance for the first time as a result of these events).
Low humidity, a lack of fire-fighting resources (exhausted from battling blazes caused by the previous nights’ raids), and hurricane-level winds at the core of the storm literally fanned the flames, scorching eight square miles of Hamburg.
One British flight lieutenant recalled seeing “not many fires but just one… I have never seen a fire like that before and never want to see its like again.”
Despite the terrible loss of civilian life, there was a strange and awful irony to all this: The horrific bombing runs affected Hitler’s war machine only slightly. It did more to wound the morale of the German people and its army officers than it did to the production of munitions, which was back running full speed within a matter of weeks.
There was some good news in America on July 28, 1943. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced the end of coffee rationing for our nation.
A United States Army bomber crashed into the Empire State Building on this day in 1945, killing 14 people. The freak accident was caused by heavy fog.
The B-25 Mitchell bomber, with two pilots and one passenger aboard, was flying from New Bedford, Massachusetts, to LaGuardia Airport in New York City. As it came into the metropolitan area on that Saturday morning, the fog was particularly thick. Air-traffic controllers instructed the plane to fly to Newark Airport instead.
This new flight plan took the plane over Manhattan; the crew was specifically warned that the Empire State Building, the tallest building in the city at the time, was not visible. The bomber was flying relatively slowly and quite low, seeking better visibility, when it came upon the Chrysler Building in midtown. It swerved to avoid the building but the move sent it straight into the north side of the Empire State Building, near the 79th floor.
Upon impact, the plane’s jet fuel exploded, filling the interior of the building with flames all the way down to the 75th floor and sending flames out of the hole the plane had ripped open in the building’s side. One engine from the plane went straight through the building and landed in a penthouse apartment across the street. Other plane parts ended up embedded in and on top of nearby buildings. The other engine snapped an elevator cable while at least one woman was riding in the elevator car. The emergency auto brake saved the woman from crashing to the bottom, but the engine fell down the shaft and landed on top of it. Quick-thinking rescuers pulled the woman from the elevator, saving her life.
Since it was a Saturday, fewer workers than normal were in the building. 11 people in the building were killed, some suffering burns from the fiery jet fuel and others after being thrown out of the building. All 11 victims were workers from War Relief Services department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, in the offices of which the plane had crashed. The three people on the plane were also killed.
An 18 foot by 20 foot hole was left in the side of the Empire State Building. Though its structural integrity was not affected, the crash did cause nearly $1 million in damages, about $10.5 million in today’s money.
In a ringing declaration indicating that America’s pre-World War II isolation was truly at an end, the U.S. Senate approves the charter establishing the United Nations on July 28, 1945.
In 1919, following the close of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson implored the U.S. Senate to approve the charter for the League of Nations. Postwar isolationism and partisan politics killed U.S. participation in the League, however. In July 1945, with World War II coming to a close, the U.S. Senate indicated the great change in American attitudes toward U.S. involvement in world affairs by approving the charter for the United Nations by a vote of 89 to 2.
President Harry S. Truman was delighted with the vote, declaring, “The action of the Senate substantially advances the cause of world peace.” Acting Secretary of State Joseph Grew also applauded the Senate’s action, noting, “Millions of men, women and children have died because nations took to the naked sword instead of the conference table to settle their differences.”
The U.N. charter would provide the “foundation and cornerstone on which the international organization to keep the peace will be built.” Once the charter had been ratified by a majority of the 50 nations that hammered out the charter in June 1945, the U.S. Senate formally approved U.S. participation in the United Nations in December 1945.
Whether the United Nations became a “foundation and cornerstone” of world peace in the years that followed is debatable, but it was certainly the scene of several notable Cold War confrontations between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1950, with the Russians absent from the U.N. Security Council, the United States pushed through a resolution providing U.N. military assistance to South Korea in the Korean War. And in one memorable moment, during a speech denouncing Western imperialism in 1960, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev took off one of his shoes and pounded his table with it to make his point.
On July 28, 1948, 182 people were killed when they L. G. Farben chemical plant exploded Ludwigshafen, Germany.
On this date in 1951, Walt Disney Studios released their delightful animated film “Alice in Wonderland.”
On July 28, 19 people were killed in a train crash in Steelton, Pennsylvania.
On this same date in 1962, NASA launched Mariner 1. Intended to reach Mars it instead fell into the Atlantic Ocean.
But it was better news for NASA and America on July 28, 1964, when it launched Ranger 7 toward the moon. It did its job and sent back 4,308 pictures to Earth.
On this day in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson announced seeking that he has ordered an increase in U.S. military forces in Vietnam, from the present 75,000 to 125,000. Johnson also said that he would order additional increases if necessary. He pointed out that to fill the increase in military manpower needs, the monthly draft calls would be raised from 17,000 to 35,000. At the same time, Johnson reaffirmed U.S. readiness to seek a negotiated end to the war, and appealed to the United Nations and any of its member states to help further this goal.
There was an immediate reaction throughout the world to this latest escalation, with communist leaders attacking Johnson for his decision to send more troops to Vietnam. Most members of Congress were reported to favor Johnson’s decision, while most U.S. state governors, convening for their annual conference, also supported a resolution backing Johnson. This decision to send more troops was regarded as a major turning point, as it effectively guaranteed U.S. military leaders a blank check to pursue the war. National protests, especially from the young people of draft age, were fiercely waged across America that didn’t stop until the war itself did.
One less known fact during the war in Vietnam is that in spite of the tragic amount of deaths from our American military, three times as many young people died on drugs.
Tragedy on July 28, 1974, when a packed bus struck a heavy truck in Belem, Brazil. 69 were killed.
1972, July 28 – In response to Soviet accusations that the United States had conducted a two-month bombing campaign intentionally to destroy the dikes and dams of the Tonkin Delta in North Vietnam, a CIA report is made public by the Nixon administration. The report claimed that U.S. bombing at 12 locations had in fact caused accidental minor damage to North Vietnam’s dikes, but the damage was unintentional and the dikes were not the intended targets of the bombings.
The nearly 2,000 miles of dikes on the Tonkin plain, and more than 2,000 along the sea, make civilized life possible in the Red River Delta. Had the dikes been intentionally targeted, their destruction would have destroyed centuries of patient work and caused the drowning or starvation of hundreds of thousands of peasants.
Bombing the dikes had been advocated by some U.S. strategists since the beginning of U.S. involvement in the war, but had been rejected outright by U.S. presidents sitting during the war as an act of terrorism.
At 3:42 a.m., on July 28, 1976, an earthquake measuring between 7.8 and 8.2 magnitude on the Richter scale flattens Tangshan, a Chinese industrial city with a population of about one million people.
As almost everyone was asleep in their beds, instead of outside in the relative safety of the streets, the quake was especially costly in terms of human life. An estimated 242,000 people in Tangshan and surrounding areas were killed, making the earthquake one of the deadliest in recorded history, surpassed only by the 300,000 who died in the Calcutta earthquake in 1737, and the 830,000 thought to have perished in China’s Shaanxi province in 1556.
Caught between the Indian and Pacific plates, China has been a very active location for earthquakes throughout history. Earthquakes have also played a significant part in China’s culture and science, and the Chinese were the first to develop functioning seismometers. The area of northern China hit by the Tangshan earthquake is particularly prone to the westward movement of the Pacific plate.
In the days preceding the earthquake, people began to notice strange phenomena in and around Tangshan. Well-water levels rose and fell. Rats were seen running in panicked packs in broad daylight. Chickens refused to eat. During the evening of July 27 and the early morning hours of July 28, people reported flashes of colored light and roaring fireballs. Still, at 3:42 a.m. most people were sleeping quietly when the earthquake struck. It lasted for 23 seconds and leveled 90 percent of Tangshan’s buildings. At least a quarter-of-a-million people were killed and 160,000 others injured. The earthquake came during the heat of midsummer, and many stunned survivors crawled out of their ruined houses naked, covered only in dust and blood. The earthquake started fires and ignited explosives and poisonous gases in Tangshan’s factories. Water and electricity were cut off, and rail and road access to the city was destroyed.
The Chinese government was ill-prepared for a disaster of this scale. The day following the quake, helicopters and planes began dropping food and medicine into the city. Some 100,000 soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army were ordered to Tangshan, and many had to march on foot from Jinzhou, a distance of more than 180 miles.
About 30,000 medical personnel were called in, along with 30,000 construction workers. The Chinese government, boasting self-sufficiency, refused all offers of foreign relief aid. In the crucial first week after the crisis, many died from lack of medical care. Troops and relief workers lacked the kind of heavy rescue training necessary to efficiently pull survivors from the rubble. Looting was also epidemic. More than 160,000 families were left homeless, and more than 4,000 children were orphaned.
Tangshan was eventually rebuilt with adequate earthquake precautions. Today, nearly two million people live there. There is speculation that the death toll from the 1976 quake was much higher than the official Chinese government figure of 242,000. Some Chinese sources have spoken privately of more than 500,000 deaths.
On July 28, 1977, every Alaskan citizen cheered as the very first oil flowed through the Alaskan pipeline, making them all wealthier.
July 28, 1978 – the price of gold tops $200 for the very first time.
Another NASA tragedy on July 28, 1986, when the doomed Challenger spacecraft disintegrated killing all on board. A transcript from the Challenger pilot, Michael Smith, could be heard to say “Uh oh!” a second before the explosion.
On July 28, 1990, Maximo Menendez falls into a coma immediately after drinking a Colombian soft drink, Pony Malta de Bavaria, in Miami, Florida. Drinking half the bottle before heading off to his job at a pet shop, Menendez remarked, “This is poisoned–it’s bad stuff,” before going into convulsions. The next day, officials at the Food and Drug Administration learned that the soft drink had been laced with a lethal dose of liquid cocaine.
After pulling every bottle of Pony Malta off the local store shelves, authorities discovered that another 45 bottles of the thick, sweet beverage contained cocaine. Apparently, a smuggling operation had failed; smugglers had planned to reclaim bottles and transform the liquid cocaine back to a sellable crystal form.
Menendez, who had escaped from Cuba only six months earlier, never regained consciousness and died in August. Finally, in June 1993, a federal grand jury indicted Hugo Rios and Alberto Gamba for their role in tampering with the Pony Malta bottles.
The late 1980s and 1990s featured all kinds of innovative smuggling schemes. In 1999, a Ghanian man sued U.S. customs over surgery they had performed to remove heroin-filled balloons from his stomach a year earlier. His claim was thrown out of court. Another man entering Puerto Rico had rubber-wrapped packages of cocaine implanted under the skin on his thighs. Earlier, authorities found a shipment of yams had been hollowed out and filled with cocaine.
In 1991, customs officers found that dog carriers from Colombia were actually made of cocaine and fiberglass. That same year, a cast iron pita oven from Turkey had 700 kilos of hashish welded inside: It was discovered when investigators realized there was no way to turn the oven on.
On this day in 1991, Dennis Martinez of the Montreal Expos pitches a perfect game to lead his team to a 2-0 victory over the Los Angeles Dodgers. Martinez was the first Latino ever to pitch a perfect game.
When he debuted with the Baltimore Orioles in 1976 at age 21, Martinez, nicknamed “El Presidente,” became the first-ever Nicaraguan player to make the major leagues. He made both starting and relief appearances in his first two seasons with the club, and in 1978, earned a permanent spot in the Orioles starting rotation alongside Hall of Famer Jim Palmer and Cy Young Award winner Mike Flanagan.
He went 16-11 in his first year as a starter with a 3.52 ERA and tossed 15 complete games. The next year, he led the major leagues with 18 complete games and 292 1/3 innings pitched. His efforts helped the Orioles win the 1979 American League pennant, though they lost to the Pittsburgh Pirates in that year’s World Series.
In 1983, the Orioles again won the American League, and this time the World Series, but Martinez, suffering from an erosion of his pitching talent due to alcoholism, had the worst year of his career, with a 7-16 record and a 5.53 ERA. The Orioles turned to more effective pitchers in the playoffs, and he sat on the bench throughout the post-season.
In 1986, in the midst of a fourth mediocre season, the O’s traded Martinez to Montreal for a player to be named later. After having to tryout for the team in 1987 on a minor league contract, Martinez bounced back in his first year in the National League with the Expos, and went on to start more than 30 games every year for eight years and rack up a winning record in seven of his eight seasons in Montreal.
When the 36-year old Martinez took the mound on July 28, 1991, he faced a Dodgers team led by veteran pitcher Mike Morgan, who threw a perfect game through five innings. For his part, Martinez cruised through the game until the sixth inning when second baseman Delino Deshields nearly committed an error, throwing low to first baseman Larry Walker. Walker somehow managed to keep contact with the bag, keeping the perfect game alive.
In the seventh, the Expos scored their first runs in 30 innings, taking advantage of two errors by Dodger shortstop Alfredo Griffin and a triple by Walker. With two outs in the ninth and the Expos leading 2-0, the Los Angeles crowd rose to their feet, hoping to see the 15th perfect game in major league history and the first in Los Angeles since Sandy Koufax’s on September 9, 1965. Dodger Chris Gwynn hit a pop fly to center field for the last out, and Martinez was mobbed by celebrating teammates at the mound.
1991 turned out to be El Presidente’s best year as an Expo: He led the National League with nine complete games, five shutouts and a 2.39 ERA, in addition to his perfect game.
Martinez retired during the 1998 season after 22 years in the big leagues with a solid 245-193 career record and a 3.70 ERA (earned run average).
On July 28, 2004, John Kerry was nominated for Vice President at the Democratic National Convention in Boston.
| July 28 2005 | The Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Ireland formally ordered an end to its armed campaign and announced the Republican organization would follow a democratic path, ending more than 30 years of violence. | |
| Also on July 28 2005 | Britain experienced its most costly tornado to date. In just four minutes the tornado did 40 million Sterling Pounds (which is equal to $62,470,000 in American money.) of destruction. Amazingly, there were no fatalities. |
And on this day in 2008, three suicide bombings took place in Baghdad, Iraq, killing 28 people and injuring 90 others. The suicide attacks were carried out by Shiite female bombers and were aimed at causing havoc among the Shia Muslim pilgrimage to a shrine.
On July 28, 2009, a bank opened in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, that was aimed at helping women with their savings. The bank, the first of its kind in Tanzania, made it easier for women to open accounts and encourage the empowerment of women in that country.
On July 28, 2013, Pope Francis held a mass for over 3 million people who had gathered to hear him on Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro. Pope Francis had been there on a five day trip to Brazil to visit the Catholic youth Festival on his first foreign trip since he became Pope.
And finally today July 28, 2015…..
WASHINGTON — After a group of GOP senators huddled Tuesday afternoon to discuss the recently released undercover “sting” videos of Planned Parenthood, Republicans unveiled legislation to strip the family planning provider of its federal funding.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) fast-tracked the legislation Tuesday night using Rule 14 of Senate procedure, setting up a procedural cloture vote to move the bill to the floor as early as Monday. That all but assures the bill will get a final vote before Senators depart for August recess.
McConnell huddled with Sens. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and a handful of other Republicans Tuesday afternoon to work through details of the bill.
“On the issue of these horrendous videos that we’ve seen with the discussions from Planned Parenthood people, we have a working group … and it is our plan to have a vote on preceding to a measure that they support sometime before we break for the August recess,” McConnell said earlier Tuesday before fast-tracking the bill.
After the meeting, Ernst introduced the legislation, which will defund Planned Parenthood and redirect its federal funds to other women’s health organizations.
The push to defund the organization comes after “sting” videos emerged two weeks ago purporting to show Planned Parenthood doctors talking about the illegal sale of fetal body parts after abortions. Planned Parenthood defends its work, saying the videos in fact show doctors discussing reimbursement for the costs incurred for donating fetal tissue for medical research — a practice that is legal.
Republicans claim the videos are evidence the family planning provider sells the fetal tissue for profit. Some 25 Republican senators signed on to the bill, including Ted Cruz (Texas), John McCain (Ariz.), John Thune (S.D.) and Deb Fischer (Neb.).
“As a mother and grandmother, I find this footage of Planned Parenthood’s role in the harvesting of the organs of unborn babies morally reprehensible and vile,” Ernst said in a statement.
“This legislation would ensure taxpayer dollars for women’s health are actually spent on women’s health — not a scandal-plagued political lobbying giant,” McConnell added.
In fact, McConnell voted in 1993 to lift a ban on fetal tissue donations after abortions, but the majority leader’s office said the new videos have raised questions about whether Planned Parenthood violated the law.
McConnell is betting the bill will win over some Democrats by requiring that the funds still go to women’s health services, including prenatal and postpartum care, immunization, family planning services (including contraception), sexually transmitted disease testing and more.
Don Stewart, McConnell’s spokesman, said there will be several member conversations with Democrats and that several Democrats have raised concerns about Planned Parenthood.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) isn’t too worried about losing Democrats on the legislation, accusing Republicans of catering to a “right-wing, crazy deal.”
“I think we have to understand that it is an attack on women’s health,” Reid said Tuesday, adding that redirecting the money would not garner support among Democrats.
When asked about Sen. John Cornyn’s (R-Texas) confidence that the bill would be designed to get 60 votes, Reid quipped, “Good luck to him.”
Ray’s This Day in History – July 28
Ray"s This Day in History - July 28