On July 14, 1789, igniting the French Revolution, the citizens of Paris stormed the Bastille prison and released seven inmates.
In 1798 Congress passed the Sedition Act, making it a federal crime to publish false, scandalous or malicious writings about the U.S. government.
In 1881 outlaw William Bonney Jr., alias Billy the Kid, was shot and killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett in Ft. Sumner, N.M.
In 1913 Gerald Ford, who would become the nation’s 38th president, was born in Omaha.
In 1933 Germany banned all political parties except the Nazi Party.
In 1958 Iraq’s King Faisal II, his entire household and his prime minister were killed in a coup by army officers.
In 1965 Adlai Stevenson II, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, former Democratic presidential candidate and a former Illinois governor, died in London; he was 65.
In 1966 eight student nurses were killed in their Southeast Side dormitory. (Drifter Richard Speck would be convicted of murder and sent to prison, where he would die in 1991.)
In 1994 a tidal wave of Hutu refugees from Rwanda’s civil war flooded across the border into Zaire and swamped relief organizations.
In 2000 a Miami jury ordered America’s biggest cigarette makers to pay nearly $145 billion in punitive damages to ill Florida smokers. (However, in 2003, a state appeals court reversed not only the award but also the class action unifying hundreds of thousands of sick Florida smokers under a single lawsuit; the Florida Supreme Court agreed in May 2004 to review that decision.)
In 2001 Katharine Graham, the 84-year-old chairwoman of the executive committee of The Washington Post Company, suffered a head injury in a fall in Sun Valley, Idaho. (She died three days later.)
In 2003 Iraq’s new governing council, in its first full day on the job, voted to send a delegation to the UN Security Council and assert its right to represent Baghdad on the world’s stage.
In 2004 the Senate scuttled a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage (48 senators voted to advance the measure — 12 short of the 60 needed — and 50 voted to block it).
