By The Associated Press

Today is Tuesday, July 24, the 205th day of 2018. There are 160 days left in the year.

Today’s Highlight in History:

On July 24, 1959, during a visit to Moscow, Vice President Richard Nixon engaged in his famous “Kitchen Debate” with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.

On this date:

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 1866, Tennessee became the first state to be readmitted to the Union after the Civil War.

In 1915, the SS Eastland, a passenger ship carrying more than 2,500 people, rolled onto its side while docked at the Clark Street Bridge on the Chicago River; an estimated 844 people died in the disaster.

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 1969, the Apollo 11 astronauts — two of whom had been the first men to set foot on the moon — splashed down safely in the Pacific.

In 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that President Richard Nixon had to turn over subpoenaed White House tape recordings to the Watergate special prosecutor.

In 1983, a two-run homer by George Brett of the Kansas City Royals was disallowed after New York Yankees manager Billy Martin pointed out there was too much pine tar on Brett’s bat. However, American League president Lee MacPhail reinstated the home run. The game was completed Aug. 18, 1983 with the Royals beating the Yankees, 5-4.

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

In 1998, a gunman burst into the U.S. Capitol, killing two police officers before being shot and captured. The shooter, Russell Eugene Weston Jr., is being held in a federal mental facility.

In 2002, nine coal miners became trapped in a flooded tunnel of the Quecreek Mine in western Pennsylvania; the story ended happily 77 hours later with the rescue of all nine.

In 2005, Lance Armstrong won his seventh consecutive Tour de France. Those wins were stripped away after Armstrong’s 2013 confession to using steroids and other banned performance-enhancing drugs and methods.

Ten years ago: Ford Motor Co. posted the worst quarterly performance in its history, losing $8.67 billion. Cheered by an enormous crowd in Berlin, Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama summoned Europeans and Americans together to “defeat terror and dry up the well of extremism that supports it” as surely as they had conquered communism a generation ago. Zvonko Busic, who’d served 32 years in a U.S. prison for hijacking a TWA jetliner and planting a bomb that killed a policeman, was paroled and returned home to Croatia.

Five years ago: The House narrowly rejected, 217-205, a challenge to the National Security Agency’s secret collection of hundreds of millions of Americans’ phone records.