Wednesday · November 11, 2026
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American history, reported as it happened
Made for the 250th
20151776 Club

New Horizons skims Pluto at 14 kilometers per second; mountains and glaciers fill the first close images

Aboard the probe: a vial of ashes belonging to Clyde Tombaugh, who spotted this same world as a blur in 1930.

For nine and a half years, New Horizons crossed the solar system toward a planet no spacecraft had ever visited. On July 14, 2015, it passed within 12,500 kilometers of Pluto's surface at nearly 14 kilometers per second, cameras locked on a world previously known only as a blurry smudge. Onboard rode a small container of Clyde Tombaugh's ashes, the man who discovered Pluto in 1930. The images that came back showed glaciers, mountains, and a heart-shaped plain nobody had predicted…

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More from July 14
1798

It is now a federal crime to publish "false or malicious" criticism of officials; Adams signs the Sedition Act

The last of four laws Congress has passed since June, the act caps a Federalist push to silence perceived French sympathizers working against the government.
1881

Garrett fires in the dark, and Billy the Kid is dead at twenty-one

The outlaw walks into Pete Maxwell's bedroom at Fort Sumner asking "¿Quién es?"; Garrett's first shot strikes just above the heart.
1943

Roosevelt signs a monument into existence for Carver; no Black American has been honored this way before

The site near Diamond, Missouri, where Carver was born into slavery, becomes the first national monument built to honor a private citizen.
20031776 Club
Two senior administration officials are the columnist's sources, eight days after Wilson accused the White House of twisting Iraq intelligence.
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More from Modern America
1994

Thirty-three years after his death, the Air Force finally makes Eugene Bullard an officer

France called him a hero and gave him a pilot's license in 1917; his own country waited until 1994 to make it official.
2012

Voyager 1 leaves the Sun's bubble; no craft has gone farther

Thirty-five years after launch, its instruments detect the plasma signature of true interstellar space.
2005

Katrina comes ashore at Buras; hours later, New Orleans is drowning

Fifty-three levee and floodwall breaches put 80 percent of the city underwater by nightfall.
1998

Two Stanford dropouts-in-waiting file the papers; Google is now a company

A hundred-thousand-dollar check written to a firm that didn't legally exist yet just cleared.
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