150 years ago in The Sun

July 12: BUYING A MOTHER'S FREEDOM -- A colored man named John Douglass, who was once a slave in Washington, and has been for some time engaged in this establishment as a pressman, has the satisfaction of seeing his mother, whom he left a slave a few years since, a free woman. John was unwilling to have his mother remain in slavery, and has been endeavoring for some time to raise money enough to buy her freedom.

100 years ago in The Sun

July 12: "A cartridge of dynamite is pretty much like a woman -- you can never tell what it is going to do next, because it doesn't know itself," said a boss blaster. "I have seen a powder salesman throw a cartridge of dynamite into the red-hot fire box of a 20-horse boiler, and the stuff just burned like lard."

50 years ago in The Sun

July 14, 1949 -- Prominent Catholic laymen here last night approved the order of Pope Pius XII excommunicating Catholics "who make profession of the materialistic and anti-Christian doctrine of the Communists."