On this day, July 30 …
2009: “Beer Summit” – Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley, the Cambridge, Mass., police officer who’d arrested him for disorderly conduct at his home, have beers with President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden at the White House to discuss the dispute that unleashed a furor over racial profiling in the U.S.
Also on this day:
- 1619: The first representative assembly in America convenes in Jamestown in the Virginia Colony.
- 1729: Baltimore, Md., is founded.
- 1942: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs a bill creating a women’s auxiliary agency in the Navy known as “Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service” — WAVES.
- 1956: President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs a measure making “In God We Trust” the national motto, replacing “E Pluribus Unum” (Out of many, one).
- 1965: President Lyndon B. Johnson signs a measure creating Medicare, which began operating the following year.
- 1975: Former Teamsters union president Jimmy Hoffa disappears in suburban Detroit. (Although presumed dead, his remains have never been found.)
- 2001: Robert Mueller, President George W. Bush’s choice to head the FBI, promises the Senate Judiciary Committee that, if confirmed, he would move forcefully to fix problems at the agency.
- 2002: WNBA player Lisa Leslie of the Los Angeles Sparks becomes the first woman to dunk in a professional game.
- 2009: “Beer Summit” – Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley, the Cambridge, Mass., police officer who’d arrested him for disorderly conduct at his home, have beers with President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden at the White House to discuss the dispute that unleashed a furor over racial profiling in the U.S.
- 2014: The House overwhelmingly approves, 420-5, a landmark bill to refurbish the Veterans Affairs Department and improve veterans’ health care.