Today's highlight On July 15, 1799, the Rosetta Stone, a key to deciphering ancient Egyptian scripts, was found at Fort Julien in the Nile Delta during the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt. Also on this date In 1834, the Spanish Inquisition was abolished more than 350 years after its creation. In 1870, Georgia became the last Confederate state to be readmitted to the Union.
In 1913, Democrat Augustus Bacon of Georgia became the first person elected to the U.S. Senate under the terms of the recently ratified 17th Amendment to the U.
S. Constitution, providing for popular election of senators. In 1916, The Boeing Company, originally known as Pacific Aero Products Co.
, was founded in Seattle. In 1976, a 36-hour kidnap ordeal began for 26 schoolchildren and their bus driver as they were abducted near Chowchilla, California, by three gunmen and imprisoned in an underground cell. (The captives escaped unharmed; the kidnappers were caught.
) In 1996, MSNBC, a 24-hour all-news network, made its debut on cable and the internet. In 1997, fashion designer Gianni Versace, 50, was shot dead outside his Miami Beach home; suspected gunman Andrew Phillip Cunanan, 27, was found dead eight days later, a suicide. (Investigators believed Cunanan killed four other people before Versace in a cross-country rampage that began the previous March.
) In 2002, John Walker Lindh, an American who'd fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan, pleaded guilty in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, to two feloni.