Today in History: Yale University history professor finds “Lost City of the Incas”


Today’s Highlight in History:


On this date:

In 1783, Latin American revolutionary Simon Bolivar (see-MOHN’ boh-LEE’-vahr) was born in Caracas, Venezuela.

In 1862, Martin Van Buren, the eighth president of the United States, and the first to have been born a U.S. citizen, died at age 79 in Kinderhook, New York, the town where he was born in 1782.



In 1911, Yale University history professor Hiram Bingham III found the “Lost City of the Incas,” Machu Picchu, in Peru.


In 1937, the state of Alabama dropped charges against four of the nine young black men accused of raping two white women in the “Scottsboro Case.”


In 1959, during a visit to Moscow, Vice President Richard Nixon engaged in his famous “Kitchen Debate” with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.


In 1987, Hulda Crooks, a 91-year-old mountaineer from California, became the oldest woman to conquer Mount Fuji, Japan’s highest peak.




Five years ago: Trying to tamp down a national uproar over race, President Barack Obama acknowledged using unfortunate words in declaring that Cambridge, Massachusetts, police had “acted stupidly” in arresting black scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., adding he’d invited the Harvard professor and Sgt. James Crowley, the arresting officer, for “a beer here in the White House.”
