On June 29, 1767, the British Parliament approved the Townsend Revenue Acts, which imposed import duties on certain goods shipped to America; colonists bitterly protested the acts, repealed in 1770.
In 1868 George Ellery Hale, the astronomer who developed the 200-inch telescope that bears his name at the Palomar Mountain Observatory near Pasadena, Calif., was born in Chicago.
In 1949 South Africa’s government banned racially mixed marriages.
In 1966 the U.S. bombed North Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi, and the port of Haiphong for the first time during the Vietnam War.
In 1972 the Supreme Court ruled that the way the death penalty was usually enforced constituted “cruel and unusual punishment.”
In 1989 the U.S. House of Representatives voted unanimously in favor of new sanctions against China because of its crackdown on the pro-democracy movement.
In 1990 Fernando Valenzuela of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Dave Stewart of the Oakland A’s became the first pitchers to hurl no-hitters in both the National and American Leagues on the same day.
In 1992 a divided Supreme Court ruled that women have a constitutional right to abortion, but the justices also weakened the right as defined by the Roe v. Wade decision. Also in 1992 the remains of Polish statesman Ignace Jan Paderewski, interred for five decades in the U.S., were returned to his homeland in keeping with his wish to be buried only in a free Poland.
In 2003 13 people were killed when a third-floor porch collapsed during a party in Lincoln Park.
