Today in History

Today in History Today is Monday, July 26, the 207th day of 2021. There are 158 days left in the year. Today’s Highlight in History: On July 26, 1775, the Continental Congress established a Post Office and appointed Benjamin Franklin its Postmaster-General. On this date: In 1788, New York became the 11th state to ratify the U.S. Constitution. In 1847, the western African country of Liberia, founded by freed American slaves, declared its independence. In 1908, U.S. Attorney General Charles J. Bonaparte ordered creation of a force of special agents that was a forerunner of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In 1945, the Potsdam Declaration warned Imperial Japan to unconditionally surrender, or face ‘œprompt and utter destruction.’� Winston Churchill resigned as Britain’s prime minister after his Conservatives were soundly defeated by the Labour Party; Clement Attlee succeeded him. In 1953, Fidel Castro began his revolt against Fulgencio Batista (fool-HEN’-see-oh bah-TEES’-tah) with an unsuccessful attack on an army barracks in eastern Cuba. (Castro ousted Batista in 1959.) In 1956, the Italian liner Andrea Doria sank off New England, some 11 hours after colliding with the Swedish liner Stockholm; at least 51 people died, from both vessels. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act. In 2002, the Republican-led House voted, 295-132, to create an enormous Homeland Security Department in the biggest government reorganization in decades. In 2006, in a dramatic turnaround from her first murder trial, Andrea Yates was found not guilty by reason of insanity by a Houston jury in the bathtub drownings of her five children; she was committed to a state mental hospital. In 2013, Ariel Castro, the man who’d imprisoned three women in his Cleveland home, subjecting them to a decade of rapes and beatings, pleaded guilty to 937 counts in a deal to avoid the death penalty. (Castro later committed suicide in prison.) In 2016, Hillary Clinton became the first woman to be nominated for president by a major political party at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. In 2017, President Donald Trump announced on Twitter that he would not ‘œaccept or allow’� transgender people to serve in the U.S. military. (After a legal battle, the Defense Department approved a new policy requiring most individuals to serve in their birth gender.) Ten years ago: The White House threatened to veto emergency House legislation that aimed to avert a threatened national default. Democratic Rep. David Wu of Oregon announced he would resign amid the political fallout from an 18-year-old woman’s allegations of an unwanted sexual encounter with him, charges that Wu denied. Five years ago: A former employee stabbed 19 disabled people to death and injured two dozen others at a residential care facility in Japan. (Satoshi Uematsu, who said he was trying to help the world by killing people he thought were burdens, was sentenced to death.)