This Day in History

1866: Ulysses S. Grant is named General of the Army, the first person to hold this rank.
1909: French engineer Louis Blériot flies across the English Channel in a monoplane that he has designed and built.
1944: During World War II, Allied forces break out of the Normandy beachhead established on D-Day (June 6), penetrating and then bypassing German lines.
1948: In a move widely regarded as marking the beginning of the Cold War, U.S. and British aircraft fly in food and supplies to Berlin, Germany, in response to the July 24 Soviet blockade of approaches from the West.
1952: Puerto Rico becomes a U.S. commonwealth.
1956: The Italian luxury liner Andrea Doria collides with the Swedish liner Stockholm off Cape Cod, MA, and sinks; some 50 people die, but more than 1,600 are rescued by other ships in the area.
1978: The first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, is born in England.
1984: Soviet cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya becomes the first woman to perform a spacewalk.
1999: American cyclist Lance Armstrong—diagnosed with cancer in 1996—wins the Tour de France.
2000: An Air France Concorde crashes shortly after takeoff from Paris, killing all 109 on board and 4 on the ground, marking the first fatal crash for the supersonic jetliner. The peace summit at Camp David between Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat and Israeli Prime Min. Ehud Barak collapses in failure.