Today in history July 19

 Today July 19 in history

1980: The opening ceremonies were held for the Moscow Summer Olympics. Missing were the United States and 64 other nations that boycotted the Games in protest of the Soviet military invasion of Afghanistan. 

 2016: Republicans meeting in Cleveland nominated Donald Trump as their presidential standard-bearer.

1969: Apollo 11 and its astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and Michael Collins, went into orbit around the moon.

1993: President Bill Clinton announced a policy allowing homosexuals to serve in the military under a compromise dubbed “don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue.”

2005: President George W. Bush announced his choice of federal appeals court judge John G. Roberts Jr. to replace Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Roberts ended up succeeding Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who died in September; Samuel Alito followed O’Connor.

2017: Sen. John McCain’s office said the 80-year-old Arizona Republican and former presidential nominee had been diagnosed with a brain tumor, glioblastoma. 

2017: President Donald Trump told The New York Times he would have chosen someone else to be attorney general if he’d known that Jeff Sessions (former Republican US Senator from Alabama) would recuse himself from the FBI probe into possible ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia.

2020" President Donald Trump refused to publicly commit to accepting the results of the upcoming election, telling Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday” it was too early to make any such guarantee. 

In 2021: The Biden administration took a step toward its goal of shutting down the Guantánamo Bay detention center for terror suspects, releasing into the custody of his home country a Moroccan (Abdullatif Nasser) who’d been held without charge almost since the U.S. opened the facility 19 years earlier. (The AP 07/19/23) Today in History: July 19, Republicans nominate Trump | AP News 

In 1799, during Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign, a French soldier discovers a black basalt slab _ to become known as the Rosetta Stone. The stone contained fragments of passages written in Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Egyptian demotic. The Greek passage announced that the three scripts were all of identical meaning. The artifact thus held the key to solving the riddle of hieroglyphics, a written language that had been “dead” for nearly 2,000 years. 

In 1942: George Washington Carver begins experimental project with Henry Ford.