By The Associated Press

Today in History

Today is Monday, June 30, the 181st day of 2025. There are 184 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

On June 30, 1982, the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution expired, having failed to receive the required number of ratifications for its adoption, despite having its seven-year deadline extended by three years.

On this date:

In 1918, labor activist and socialist Eugene V. Debs was arrested in Cleveland, charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 for a speech he’d made two weeks earlier denouncing U.S. involvement in World War I. (Debs was sentenced to prison and disenfranchised for life.)

In 1921, President Warren G. Harding nominated former President William Howard Taft to be chief justice of the United States, succeeding the late Edward Douglass White.

In 1934, Adolf Hitler launched his “blood purge” of political and military rivals in Germany in what came to be known as “The Night of the Long Knives.”

In 1958, the U.S. Senate passed the Alaska statehood bill by a vote of 64-20.

In 1971, the Supreme Court ruled, 6-3, that the government could not prevent The New York Times or The Washington Post from publishing the Pentagon Papers. A Soviet space mission ended in tragedy when three cosmonauts aboard Soyuz 11 were found dead of asphyxiation inside their capsule after it had returned to Earth.

In 1985, 39 American hostages from a hijacked TWA jetliner were freed in Beirut after being held 17 days.

In 1986, the Supreme Court, in Bowers v. Hardwick, ruled 5-4 that states could outlaw homosexual acts between consenting adults (however, the nation’s highest court effectively reversed this decision in 2003 in Lawrence v. Texas).

In 1994, the U.S. Figure Skating Association stripped Tonya Harding of the national championship and banned her for life for her role in the attack on rival Nancy Kerrigan.

In 2009, American soldier Pfc. Bowe R. Bergdahl went missing from his base in eastern Afghanistan, and was later confirmed to have been captured by insurgents after walking away from his post. (Bergdahl was released on May 31, 2014 in exchange for five Taliban detainees; he pleaded guilty to desertion and misbehavior before the enemy, but was spared a prison sentence by a military judge.)

In 2016, saying it was the right thing to do, Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced that transgender people would be allowed to serve openly in the U.S. military, ending one of the last bans on service in the armed forces.

In 2020, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves signed a landmark bill retiring the last state flag bearing the Confederate battle emblem. Boston’s arts commission voted unanimously to remove a statue depicting a freed slave kneeling at Abraham Lincoln’s feet.

Ten years ago: Nineteen elite firefighters known as members of the Granite Mountain Hotshots were killed battling a wildfire northwest of Phoenix after a change in wind direction pushed the flames back toward their position. Addressing students at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, President Barack Obama declared that the future of the young and growing continent still rested in Nelson Mandela’s vision for equality and opportunity. Inbee Park won the U.S. Women’s Open in Southampton, New York, for her third straight major of the year.

seven years ago: Hundreds of thousands of people gathered for rallies and marches in hundreds of locations around the country, demanding an end to the separation of immigrant families who cross into the United States. In Portland, Oregon, skirmishes between right-wing and left-wing groups left four people hospitalized. In the Iranian city of Khorramshahr, an initially peaceful protest over water shortages turned violent as police and protesters clashed.

Three year ago: Ketanji Brown Jackson was sworn in to the Supreme Court, shattering a glass ceiling as the first Black woman on the nation’s highest court. The 51-year-old Jackson became the court’s 116th justice, taking the place of a justice she once worked for, Stephen Breyer, whose retirement took effect as she took over. The same day, in a blow to the fight against climate change, the Supreme Court limited how the nation’s main anti-air pollution law could be used to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. By a 6-3 vote, the court said that the Clean Air Act did not give the Environmental Protection Agency broad authority to regulate greenhouse gas emi

Today’s Birthdays: Actor Lea Massari (“L’Avventura”) is 92. Actor Nancy Dussault (doo-SOH’) is 89. Olympic track champion Billy Mills is 87. Oceanographer Robert Ballard is 83. Singer-songwriter Glenn Shorrock (Little River Band) is 81. Jazz musician Stanley Clarke is 74. Actor David Garrison (“Married…with Children) is 73. Actor-comedian David Alan Grier is 69. Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen is 67. Actor Vincent D’Onofrio is 66. Actor Deirdre Lovejoy (“The Wire”) is 63. Actor Rupert Graves is 62. Boxer Mike Tyson is 59. Actor Monica Potter is 54. Actor Rick Gonzalez is 46. Actor Lizzy Caplan is 43. Country music singer-songwriter Cole Swindell is 42. Singer and actress Fantasia is 41. Olympic swimming champion Michael Phelps is 40. Baseball player Trea Turner is 32.