Today in history, July 24
Today in history, July 24
USA TODAYTue, July 7, 2026 at 6:33 PM UTC
0
July 24
Today in history
Today is July 24. On this date in:
1847: After 17 months and hundreds of miles of travel, Brigham Young led a group of 148 Mormon pioneers into Utah’s Valley of the Great Salt Lake.
1866: Tennessee regained congressional representation and became the first Confederate state to be readmitted to the Union after it ratified the 14th Amendment.
1897: Aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart, the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean solo, was born in Atchison, Kansas.
1911: With the help of locals in the region, American archaeologist Hiram Bingham III rediscovered the ruins of Machu Picchu, an ancient settlement and citadel of the Incas tucked away in the countryside of the Eastern Cordillera of southern Peru.
1915: The passenger ship SS Eastland rolled over to its port side while docked in the Chicago River in Chicago. A total of 844 passengers and crew were killed in one of the worst maritime disasters in U.S. history.
1923: One of the final treaties of World War I, the Treaty of Lausanne, was signed at Palais de Rumine in Lausanne, Switzerland, by Greece, France, Turkey, Britain, Italy, Japan, Romania and the then-Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Its purpose was to resolve the conflicts between those countries and set boundaries for Turkey.
Advertisement
1929: The Kellogg-Briand Pact went into effect. The pact, signed by most world powers – including France, Germany and the United States – was an international peace agreement in which the signatory states promised that “disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them” will not be resolved through war. A decade later, World War II began.
1943: Operation Gomorrah began as British and U.S. planes bombed the city of Hamburg, Germany, creating a firestorm and killing at least 34,000.
1959: U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev engaged in an impromptu debate over each nation’s policies and progress at the American National Exhibition at Sokolniki Park in Moscow. The heated conversation reached its peak while the two leaders toured a model of an American kitchen, whereby the infamous incident got its nickname: The Kitchen Debate.
1969: Apollo 11 – the U.S. space mission that had taken Cmdr. Neil Armstrong and Lunar Module Pilot Buzz Aldrin to the surface of the moon while Command Module Pilot Michael Collins waited over 21 hours for them and flew Columbia around the moon – landed safely back on Earth, splashing into the Pacific Ocean.
1974: In a blow to President Richard Nixon, the U. S. Supreme Court unanimously rejected his claims of “absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances” and ordered him to surrender White House tapes to the Watergate investigation.
1982: Torrential rain caused flooding and mudslides in the Nagasaki Prefecture of Japan. The flooding was so intense that it led to the collapse of a 350-year-old stone bridge. An estimated 299 people were killed.
2020: Regis Philbin, the TV host known for “Live! With Regis and Kathie Lee” and the widely popular game show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” died at age 88 from a heart attack.
– USA TODAY Network
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Today in history, July 24
Source: “AOL Breaking”
