July 19th:
711 – Battle of Guadalete: Umayyad forces under Tariq ibn Ziyad defeat the Visigoths led by their king Roderic.
1553 – Fifteen-year-old Lady Jane Grey was deposed as queen of England after claiming the crown for nine days. Mary, the daughter of King Henry VIII, was proclaimed Queen Mary I.
1834 – Edgar Degas, the French Impressionist painter and sculptor, was born.
1870 – The Franco-Prussian war, which led to the unification of the German states, began.
1941 – British Prime Minister Winston Churchill launched his “V for Victory” campaign in Europe.
1943 – Allied air forces raided Rome during World War II.
1969 – Apollo 11 and its astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins, went into orbit around the moon.
1979 – The Nicaraguan capital of Managua fell to Sandinista guerrillas, two days after President Anastasio Somoza fled the country.
1980 – The Moscow Summer Olympics began; dozens of nations boycotted the games because of Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan.
1985 – Christa McAuliffe of New Hampshire was chosen to be the first schoolteacher to ride aboard the space shuttle. (She died in the Challenger explosion in 1986.)
1989 – A United Air Lines DC-10 crashed while making an emergency landing at Sioux City, Iowa, killing 112 people; 184 survived.
1990 – Baseball’s all-time hits leader Pete Rose was sentenced in Cincinnati to five months in prison for tax evasion.
2005 – President George W. Bush announced his choice of federal appeals court judge John Roberts to replace Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
2006 – President George W. Bush issued his first presidential veto, rejecting a bill that could have multiplied federal money for embryonic stem cell research.