Today is July 24. On this date in:
1567
Mary, Queen of Scots, who was imprisoned at Lochleven Castle, was forced to abdicate the throne. The Scottish crown was passed to her 1-year-old son, who became James VI of Scotland.
1858
Republican senatorial candidate Abraham Lincoln formally challenged Democrat Stephen A. Douglas to a series of political debates; the result was seven face-to-face encounters.
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.
1866
Tennessee became the first state to be readmitted to the Union after the Civil War.
1911
Yale archaeologist Hiram Bingham located Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas, in Peru.
1915
The SS Eastland, a passenger ship carrying more than 2,500 people, rolled onto its side while docked on the Chicago River; an estimated 844 people died.
1937
Alabama dropped charges against four of the nine young black men accused of raping two white women in the “Scottsboro Case.”
1959
During a visit to Moscow, Vice President Richard Nixon engaged in his famous “Kitchen Debate” with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
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.
1974
The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled President Richard Nixon had to turn over subpoenaed White House tape recordings to the Watergate special prosecutor.
1987
Hulda Crooks, a 91-year-old mountaineer from California, became the oldest woman to conquer Mount Fuji, Japan’s highest peak.
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.)
1998
Steven Spielberg’s World War II film “Saving Private Ryan” starring Tom Hanks was released.
2002
Nine coal miners became trapped in a flooded tunnel of the Quecreek Mine in western Pennsylvania; the story ended happily 77 hours later with the rescue of all nine.
2005
Lance Armstrong won his seventh consecutive Tour de France. (Those wins were stripped away after Armstrong’s 2013 confession to using steroids and other banned performance-enhancing drugs and methods.)
2014
Air Algérie Flight 5017, an MD-83 carrying 116 people, crashed in northern Mali, killing all on board; it was the third major international aviation disaster in a week.
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