Tag: June 24

On June 24, 1947, what’s regarded as the first modern UFO sighting took place.In 1957, the U.S. Supreme Court, in Roth v. United States, ruled 6-3 that obscene materials were not protected by the First Amendment.

In 1964, AT&T inaugurated commercial “Picturephone” service between New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C. (the service, however, never caught on).

In 1992, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, strengthened its 30-year ban on officially sponsored worship in public schools, prohibiting prayer as a part of graduation ceremonies.

In 2015, a federal judge formally sentenced Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death for the 2013 terror attacks. (A federal appeals court later threw out the sentence; the Supreme Court this fall will consider reinstating it.)

On June 23, 1888, abolitionist Frederick Douglass received one vote from the Kentucky delegation at the Republican convention in Chicago, effectively making him the first Black candidate to have his name in nomination for U.S. president.

In 1972, President Richard Nixon signed Title IX barring discrimination on the basis of sex for “any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” On the same day he and White House chief of staff H.R. Haldeman discussed using the CIA to obstruct the Watergate investigation.

In 1988, James E. Hansen, a climatologist at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told a Senate panel that global warming of the earth caused by the “greenhouse effect” was a reality.

In 1995, Dr. Jonas Salk, the medical pioneer who developed the first vaccine to halt the crippling rampage of polio, died in La Jolla, California, at 80.