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Today in History: The Seneca Falls Convention

Today in History: The Seneca Falls Convention

Boston Globe6 days ago
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In 1848, the first 'Convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of Woman' convened at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, N.Y.
In 1969, Apollo 11 and its astronauts —Neil Armstrong, Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin, and Michael Collins —went into orbit around the moon.
In 1975, the Apollo and Soyuz space capsules that were linked in orbit for two days separated.
In 1979, the Nicaraguan capital of Managua fell to Sandinista guerrillas, two days after President Anastasio Somoza fled the country.
In 1980, the Moscow Summer Olympics began, minus dozens of nations that were boycotting the games because of Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan.
In 1989, 111 people were killed when United Air Lines Flight 232, a DC-10 which sustained the uncontained failure of its tail engine and the loss of hydraulic systems, crashed while making an emergency landing at Sioux City, Iowa; 185 other people survived.
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In 1990, baseball's all-time hits leader, Pete Rose, was sentenced in Cincinnati to five months in prison for tax evasion.
In 1993, President Bill Clinton announced a policy allowing gays to serve in the military under a compromise dubbed 'don't ask, don't tell, don't pursue.'
In 2006, prosecutors reported that Chicago police beat, kicked, shocked, or otherwise tortured scores of Black suspects from the 1970s to the early 1990s to try to extract confessions from them.
In 2005, President George W. Bush announced his choice of federal appeals court judge John G. Roberts Jr. to replace Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. (Roberts ended up succeeding Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who died in September 2005; Samuel Alito followed O'Connor.)
In 2013, in a rare and public reflection on race, President Barack Obama called on the nation to do some soul searching over the death of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of his shooter, George Zimmerman, saying the slain Black teenager 'could have been me 35 years ago.'
In 2018, a duck boat packed with tourists capsized and sank in high winds on a lake in the tourist town of Branson, Missouri, killing 17 people.
In 2021, Paul Allard Hodgkins, a Florida man who breached the U.S. Senate chamber on Jan. 6, 2021, carrying a Trump campaign flag, received an eight-month prison term in the first resolution of a felony case arising from the US Capitol insurrection. (In 2025, President Donald Trump pardoned, commuted the prison sentences, or vowed to dismiss the cases of all 1,500-plus people charged with crimes in the riot.)
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In 2022, Britain
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