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19971776 Club

NHL awards four expansion franchises; Nashville, Atlanta, Columbus, and Minnesota to join the league

Bettman's push into the Sunbelt adds nearly 70,000 seats across cities that have never hosted professional hockey, with the first new team set to take the ice in 1998.

By 1997, the NHL under Commissioner Gary Bettman was determined to plant the game in American cities that had never seen professional hockey. That June, the league approved four new franchises in a tiered expansion: Nashville for the 1998-99 season, Atlanta for 1999-2000, and both Columbus and Minnesota for 2000-01. The four teams — the Predators, Thrashers, Blue Jackets, and Wild — would together add nearly 70,000 new seats to the league's footprint. Three of the four franchises are still playing where they started; the Thrashers relocated to Winnipeg in 2011…

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More from June 25
1788

Virginia ratifies, 89 to 79; the union's largest state is in

Patrick Henry's three weeks of thunder fall short as Edmund Randolph switches sides, and the promise of a Bill of Rights seals the margin.
2013

CIA releases documents confirming a classified base at Groom Lake, Nevada exists

The disclosure, triggered by a Freedom of Information Act request filed eight years ago by a George Washington University researcher, answers narrow historical questions; current operations remain classified.
1950

North Korean guns open on the 38th parallel at dawn; Seoul has no tanks to stop them

Kim Il Sung's forces pour south into an almost entirely unprepared country; the U.N. Security Council condemns the invasion, and Truman moves toward committing U.S. troops.
19981776 Club
The Presentment Clause forbids the president from unilaterally excising provisions from enacted law, the Court rules, voiding cuts to a New York liability exemption and a Snake River potato-farmer tax break.
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More from Modern America
1997

Old Ironsides sails again; Cronkite takes the helm off Marblehead

The 1797 frigate moves under her own canvas for the first time in 116 years, on sails paid for through a national campaign of citizen and student donations.
1999

Collins becomes first woman to command a shuttle; Columbia loses an engine on the way up

A loose pin ruptures coolant tubes during ascent, but Columbia still reaches orbit to release the heaviest payload NASA had ever flown.
1998

Clinton tells grand jury of "improper" ties to Lewinsky, then tells the country he misled them

Seven months after denying it on camera, the president reverses himself twice in one day.
1998

Thirteen Tomahawks hit a Khartoum medicine factory; Washington says it made nerve gas

The strike came thirteen days after the embassy bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and the target was a plant that made most of Sudan's antibiotics.
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