Today in History: July 22, First solo around-the-world flight
Today is Tuesday, July 22, the 203rd day of 2025. There are 162 days left in the year.
Today in history:
On July 22, 1933, Aviator Wiley Post landed at Floyd Bennett Field in New York City, completing the first solo flight around the world in 7 days, 18 hours and 49 minutes.
Also on this date:
In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln presented to his Cabinet a preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation.
In 1934, bank robber John Dillinger was shot to death by federal agents outside Chicago’s Biograph Theater, where he had just seen the Clark Gable movie “Manhattan Melodrama.”
In 1937, the U.S. Senate rejected President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s proposal to add more justices to the Supreme Court.
In 1942, the Nazis began transporting Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka concentration camp.
In 1943, American forces led by Gen. George S. Patton captured Palermo, Sicily, during World War II.
In 1975, the House of Representatives joined the Senate in voting to restore the American citizenship of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
In 1991, police in Milwaukee arrested Jeffrey Dahmer, who later confessed to murdering 17 men and boys.
In 1992, Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar escaped from his luxury prison near Medellin (meh-deh-YEEN’). (He was slain by security forces in December 1993.)
In 2011, Anders Breivik (AHN’-durs BRAY’-vihk), a self-described “militant nationalist,” massacred 69 people at a Norwegian island youth retreat after detonating a bomb in nearby Oslo that killed eight others in the nation’s worst violence since World War II.
In 2015, a federal grand jury indictment charged Dylann Roof, the young man accused of killing nine Black church members in Charleston, South Carolina, with 33 counts including hate crimes that made him eligible for the death penalty. (Roof would become the first person sentenced to death for a federal hate crime; he is on death row at a federal prison in Indiana.)
In 2022, Steve Bannon, a longtime ally of former President Donald Trump, was convicted of contempt charges for defying a congressional subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. (Bannon is currently serving his four-month sentence in federal prison.)
Today’s Birthdays:
- Actor Terence Stamp is 87.
- Singer George Clinton is 84.
- Actor-singer Bobby Sherman is 82.
- Former Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, is 82.
- Movie writer-director Paul Schrader is 79.
- Actor Danny Glover is 79.
- Singer Mireille Mathieu is 79.
- Actor-comedian-director Albert Brooks is 78.
- Rock singer Don Henley is 78.
- Author S.E. Hinton is 77.
- Film composer Alan Menken is 76.
- Jazz musician Al Di Meola (mee-OH’-lah) is 71.
- Actor Willem Dafoe is 70.
- Actor John Leguizamo is 65.
- R&B singer Keith Sweat is 64.
- Folk singer Emily Saliers (Indigo Girls) is 62.
- Actor-comedian David Spade is 61.
- Actor Rhys Ifans (rees EYE’-fanz) is 58.
- Actor/singer Jaime Camil is 52.
- Singer Rufus Wainwright is 52. Actor Franka Potente (poh-TEN’-tay) is 51.
- Actor Selena Gomez is 33.
- NFL running back Ezekiel Elliott is 30.