This Day in History

[GordMay]

July 5

1535: English humanist and statesman Thomas More was beheaded, for refusing to accept King Henry VIII as head of the Church of England.

1610: John Guy sets sail from Bristol, with 39 other colonists, for Newfoundland.

1687: Isaac Newton's great work, ‘Principia’ [“Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica”, “The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy”] published, by Royal Society in England, outlining his laws of motion and universal gravitation.

1791: Jose Maria Narvaez discovers Point Grey (now Vancouver, British Columbia).

1859: Captain N.C. Brooks discovered the Midway Islands, in the central Pacific Ocean, and claimed the territory for the United States.

1885: Louis Pasteur successfully tested an antirabies vaccine.

1937: Spam, the luncheon meat ,is first introduced into the market, by the Hormel Foods Corporation.

1943: The Battle of Kursk [Koersk], the largest tank battle in history, begins.

1946: French designer Louis Réard unveils a daring two-piece swimsuit, at the Piscine Molitor, a popular swimming pool in Paris. Parisian showgirl Micheline Bernardini modeled the new fashion, which Réard dubbed “bikini,” inspired by a news-making U.S. atomic test, that took place off the Bikini Atoll, in the Pacific Ocean, earlier that week.

1950: US forces enter combat in the Korean War, for the first time, in the Battle of Osan.

1951: Dr William Shockley invents the junction transistor.

1964: Nyasaland broke from British rule, and became the independent country of Malawi, within the Commonwealth of Nations.

1975: Cape Verde Islands gain independence, after 500 years of Portuguese rule.

1994: Amazon.com founded, in Bellevue, Washington, by Jeff Bezos.

1996: Dolly, a female Finn Dorset sheep, was born near Edinburgh, becoming the first successfully cloned mammal; her birth was not publicly revealed until the following year.

2003: The World Health Organization (WHO) announces that all person-to-person transmission of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) has ceased. In the previous eight months, the disease had killed about 775 people, in 29 countries, and exposed the dangers of globalization, in the context of public health. In spite of WHO’s announcement, a new case was diagnosed in China, in January 2004, and four more diagnoses followed that April.

[GordMay]

July 6

1484: Portuguese sea captain Diogo Cão finds the mouth of the Congo River.

1536: Jacques Cartier returns to France, after discovering the St. Lawrence River, in Canada.

1590: English admiral Francis Drake takes Portuguese Forts, at Taag.

1699: Pirate Captain William Kidd is captured, in Boston.

1747: US naval officer John Paul Jones was born, in Kirkbean, Scotland.

1770: The entire Ottoman fleet is destroyed by the Russians, at the Battle of Chesma.

1775: US Congress issues "Declaration of the Causes & Necessity of Taking up Arms", listing grievances, but denying intent to be independent.

1908: Robert Peary's arctic expedition sails from NYC, for the north pole.

1942: Anne Frank's family goes into hiding, in After House, Amsterdam.

1945: Nicaragua becomes 1st nation to ratify the Charter of the United Nations.

1955: The US Federal Air Pollution Control Act was implemented, for research into causal analysis and control of car-emission pollution. The killer fog in London, that had left over 4,000 dead, created concern around the world over the effects of emissions pollution, and the act made the funds available, for analysis and control of car-emission pollution.

1975: The Comoros Islands gained independence, after about 137 years of French rule. Their official name is the Union of the Comoros.

1988: An explosion on the Piper Alpha oil rig, 120 miles off the north east coast of Scotland in the North Sea, caused a fireball 350 feet high, and engulfed the platform, killing 167 workers.

2011: A boat travelling to Saudi Arabia, that was carrying around 200 migrants, caught on fire and sank in the Red Sea, killing 197 people. Officials stated that the passengers were likely to have been Somalis, who were trying to flee the drought. Only three people were rescued.

2013: An unattended freight train, that had been carrying crude oil, was derailed, causing a large fire and explosion, in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, Canada. Forty-two people were confirmed dead [5 missing], and more than thirty buildings in the town's center were destroyed.

2016: South African athlete Oscar Pistorius is sentenced to 6 years in jail, for the murder of his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, in 2013.
2017: France announces it will ban petrol and diesel cars, by 2040.

2020: America officially begins withdrawing from the World Health Organization.

[GordMay]

July 7

1456: A retrial verdict acquits Joan of Arc of heresy, 25 years after her death.

1550: Traditional date Chocolate thought to have been introduced to Europe.

1668: Isaac Newton receives MA from Trinity College, Cambridge.

1753: British parliament grants Jews citizenship.

1770: A Russian fleet destroyed an Ottoman fleet, in the Battle of Çeşme, on the Aegean Sea.

1801: Toussaint Louverture declares Haitian independence.

1807: First Treaty of Tilsit signed by Napoleon I of France, and Alexander I of Russia. Napoleon and Alexander met in a raft on the Neman River. There they signed the Treaty of Tilsit, where they formed an alliance. Russia became a part of the Continental System, which was the attempt by Napoleon to blockade Britain.

1850: Scottish explorer Edward Eyre reaches Albany, Western Australia.

1853: Japan opens its ports to trade with the West after 250 years of isolation.

1865: Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, David Herold and George Atzerodt are executed, for their role in the conspiracy to assassinate US President Abraham Lincoln [April 14]. John Wilkes Booth, the man who pulled the trigger, was killed in a shootout with government troops 12 days after the murder.

1898: The U.S. Congress annexed Hawaii, through a joint resolution [Organic Act], signed by President William McKinley, on this day, paving the way for the islands to become a territory (1900), and later a U.S. state (1959).

1908: The ‘Great White Fleet’ leaves San Francisco Bay, to circumnavigate the globe to project American naval power.

1928: Sliced bread sold for the first time, by the Chillicothe Baking Company, Missouri, using a machine invented by Otto Frederick Rohwedder. Described as the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped.

1930: Construction of the Boulder [now Hoover] Dam begins.

1936: RCA shows 1st real TV program (dancing, film on locomotives, Bonwit Teller fashion show and monologue from Tobacco Road & comedy).

1947: Alleged Roswell UFO incident. An object crashed into a ranch, near Rosewell, New Mexico, raising speculations that the object was an extraterrestrial spacecraft, containing alien life forms.

1978: Solomon Islands declares independence from UK.

1981: The solar-powered aircraft, “Solar Challenger”, successfully completes a 163 mile flight across the English Channel.

1987: Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North begins public testimony at Iran-Contra hearing.

1996: Nelson Mandela steps down as President of South Africa.

2005: Bombs are detonated, in three crowded London subways, and one bus, during the peak of the city’s morning rush hour. The synchronized suicide bombings, which were thought to be the work of al-Qaida, killed 56 people, including the bombers, and injured another 700. It was the largest attack on Great Britain since World War II.

2017: United Nations nuclear weapon ban treaty adopted in New York, without participation of nuclear countries.
2017: Tesla Motors produces its first mass-market car, the Model 3.

[GordMay]

July 8

1099: 15,000 starving Christian soldiers, of the First Crusade, march in religious procession around Jerusalem, as its Muslim defenders look on.

1497: Vasco da Gama sailed from Lisbon, with a fleet of four vessels, and he ultimately opened a sea route from western Europe to Asia, by way of the Cape of Good Hope, ushering in a new era in world history.

1776: Colonel John Nixon gives the 1st public reading of the US Declaration of Independence, to an assemblage of citizens in Philadelphia.

1836: Charles Darwin reaches Saint Helena, in HMS “Beagle”, and takes up lodgings near the tomb of Napoleon.

1853: Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry, representing the U.S. government, sails his frigate “Susquehanna” into Tokyo Bay, Japan, with a squadron of four vessels. For a time, Japanese officials refused to speak with Perry, but under threat of attack by the superior American ships they accepted letters from President Millard Fillmore, making the United States the first Western nation to establish relations with Japan ,since it had been declared closed to foreigners, two centuries before.

1889: Journalist Charles Henry Dow published the first issue of The Wall Street Journal.

1951: Paris, the capital city of France, celebrates turning 2,000 years old. In fact, a few more candles would’ve technically been required on the birthday cake, as the City of Lights was most likely founded around 250 B.C.

1954: Col. Carlos Castillo Armas is elected president of the junta, that overthrew the administration of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in late June 1954.

1960: The Soviet Union charges American “U2" pilot Francis Gary Powers with espionage.

1963: US bans all monetary transactions with Cuba.

1990: 12:34:56 on 7/8/90 [1234567890].

2011: The orbiter Atlantis was launched, on the last space shuttle mission.

2018: Four boys are the first to be rescued, after 16 days, from Tham Luang cave, Thailand, by Thai and international rescue team.

2020: South Americans and Polynesians made contact around 1200 A.D., according to new genomic study [1] in "Nature", people from eastern Polynesia had DNA from indigenous Colombia
“Ancient voyage carried Native Americans’ DNA to remote Pacific islands”
About ➥ https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02055-4
[1]“Native American gene flow into Polynesia predating Easter Island settlement” ~ by Alexander G. Ioannidis et al
Study ➥ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2487-2

[GordMay]

July 9

1401: Turko-Mongol ruler Tamerlane [Timur] destroys Baghdad, killing 20,000.

1536: French navigator Jacques Cartier returns to Saint-Malo, from Canada.

1745: Bonnie Prince Charlie's warship “Elisabeth” battles HMS “Lion”.

1762: Catherine the Great overthrew Peter III, and began her reign as empress of Russia, leading her country into full participation in the political and cultural life of Europe, and extending Russian territory.

1790: The Swedish navy captures one third of the Russian fleet, at the [second] Battle of Svensksund, in the Baltic Sea.

1797: Edmund Burke, Irish politician, philosopher, died.

1816: The Congress of Tucumán declared Argentina's independence from Spain.

1846: American naval captain Captain John Montgomery occupies the small settlement of Yerba Buena, a site that will later be renamed San Francisco, and claimed the settlement for the United States, raising the American flag in the central plaza.

1856: Nikola Tesla, a Serbian American inventor and researcher, electrical pioneer, was born this day [or the next], in Smiljan, Croatia.

1867: An unsuccessful expedition led by E.D Young sets out to search for Dr David Livingstone (Scottish missionary and explorer).

1877: The All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club begins its first lawn tennis tournament, at Wimbledon. Twenty-two gentlemen registered for the tournament, but only 21 showed up on July 9, for its first day. In the final, W. Spencer Gore dominated, [July 19] with his strong volleying game, crushing William Marshall, 6-1, 6-2, 6-4.

1900: The Commonwealth of Australia is established, by an act of British Parliament, uniting the separate colonies, under a federal government.

1917: British battleship HMS “Vanguard” explodes at Scapa Flow (the result of an internal explosion of faulty cordite), killing 804.

1955: The Russell-Einstein Manifesto is released by Bertrand Russell, in London, on the need to avoid nuclear war.

1957: Discovery of element 102, Nobelium, announced.

1958: A megatsunami hit Lituya Bay in Alaska, United States, resulting in a wave that was recorded to be 1,720 feet or 516 meters high. This is the highest wave recorded in history.

1960: The “Thresher”, the first of a class of U.S. nuclear-powered attack submarines, was launched; it sank in 1963 in the worst submarine accident in history.

1962: Bob Dylan records “Blowin’ in the Wind”. “This here ain’t no protest song or anything like that, ’cause I don’t write no protest songs.” was how Bob Dylan introduced one of the most eloquent protest songs ever written, when he first performed it publicly.
1962: Andy Warhol's iconic Campbell's Soup Cans make their debut, at the Ferus Gallery, in Los Angeles.

1982: 30-year-old Michael Fagan broke into Buckingham Palace, and spent 10 minutes talking with Queen Elizabeth II, in her bedroom, before being arrested inside the palace, at 3 a.m.

1995: American rock band, the Grateful Dead, unexpectedly performed their last concert, at Soldier Field in Chicago; lead guitarist and vocalist Jerry Garcia died the following month.

2002: The African Union is established, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The first chairman is Thabo Mbeki, President of South Africa.

2011: South Sudan gains independence, and secedes from Sudan. The North East African country, formally known as Republic of South Sudan, peacefully seceded from Sudan, after an independence referendum was passed. Since independence, however, the country has been wracked with widespread ethnic violence, and human rights violations.

2017: CEO Elon Musk is the first owner of Telsa's first mass market electric car, the Model 3.

2018: Bright pink is the world's oldest biological colour, according to scientists, produced by tiny cyanobacteria in 1.1bn-year-old marine shale rock, from Taoudeni basin, Mauritania.
2018: US coffee company Starbucks announces it will stop using plastic straws by 2020, reducing use of more than 1 billion straws a year.

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by GordMay

...2011: South Sudan gains independence, and secedes from Sudan. The North East African country, formally known as Republic of South Sudan, peacefully seceded from Sudan, after an independence referendum was passed. Since independence, however, the country has been wracked with widespread ethnic violence, and human rights violations ...

South Sudan celebrates 10 years of independence – but few rejoice

Ten years after becoming the world’s youngest nation, war-torn South Sudan mired in instability and faced with a deteriorating humanitarian crisis.

More ➥ https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/...ut-few-rejoice

[GordMay]

July 10

1040: Lady Godiva rides naked on horseback through Coventry, according to legend, to force her husband, the local ruling Leofric, Earl of Merica, to lower taxes. The Leofric did take away all taxes, except for those on horses.

1520: The Spanish explorer Hernan Cortes is driven from Tenochtitlan, and retreats to Tlaxcala.

1553: Lady Jane Grey, the 15-year-old great-granddaughter of Henry VII, became queen of England, but her reign lasted only nine days, and she was executed by Mary Tudor the following year.

1690: French fleet defeat Anglo-Dutch fleet, under Cornelis Evertsen, at battle of Beachy Head.

1739: King George II authorises the Admiralty Board to seek maritime reprisals, against Spain [War of Jenkin's Ear].

1778: In support of the American Revolution, Louis XVI, of France, declares war on England.

1780: The Comte de Rochambeau, and his French force of 7,000, land at Newport, Rhode Island, to join the American Revolutionary War.

1796: Carl Friedrich Gauss discovers that every positive integer is representable as a sum of, at most, three triangular numbers.

1908: H Kamerlingh Onnes makes helium liquid [-269°C].

1925: The trial [aka: Monkey Trial] of Tennessee teacher John T. Scopes, over the teaching of Charles Darwin‘s theory of evolution, opens, with Clarence Darrow appearing for the defense, and William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution. The judge ruled out any test of the law’s constitutionality, or argument on the validity of the theory, limiting the trial to the single question of whether John T. Scopes had taught evolution, which he admittedly had. He was convicted and fined $100. On appeal, the state Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the 1925 law, but acquitted Scopes, on the technicality that he had been fined excessively. The law, which declared unlawful the teaching of any doctrine denying the divine creation of man as taught by the Bible, was repealed in 1967.

1944: "Father of Medicare", Tommy Douglas becomes the 7th Premier of Saskatchewan, Canada.

1951: Armistice talks, to end Korean conflict, began at Kaesong.

1960: Belgium sends troops to the Congo to protect whites as the Congolese Bloodbath begins, just 10 days after the former colony became independent of Belgian rule.

1962: The geosynchronous satellite ‘Telstar’ is launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, beaming live television between Europe and the United States.
1962: Swedish engineer Nils Bohlin was issued a U.S. patent for a three-point seatbelt for cars; a major safety innovation, it featured a strap that extended across the upper body in addition to a standard lap restraint.

1973: The Bahamas gained independence from Britain, within the Commonwealth.

1976: In Seveso, near Milan, Italy, an explosion in a chemical factory covers the surrounding area with toxic dioxin. Time magazine has ranked the Seveso incident No. 8 on its list of the 10 worst environmental disasters.

1981: CERN achieves 1st proton-antiproton beam collision [570 GeV].

1985: The Greenpeace ship "Rainbow Warrior" was sunk by two bomb explosions, while berthed in Auckland Harbour, New Zealand. It was later revealed that French intelligence agents had planted the explosives. Dutch photographer Fernando Pereira is killed.
1985: Coca-Cola Co. announces it will resume selling "old formula Coke," following a public outcry and falling sales of its "new Coke."

1992: The Alaska court of appeals overturns the conviction of Joseph Hazelwood, the former captain of the oil tanker Exxon Valdez.

2017: NASA's Juno spacecraft makes closest ever pass over Jupiter's Great Red Spot. at 9,000 kilometers overhead.

2018: The final 4 boys, and their coach, are rescued from Tham Luang Nang Non cave, Thailand, after being trapped there for 18 days, by monsoon flooding.

2019: Earliest evidence of modern humans, outside Africa, found with 210,000 year old skull, from Apidima Cave, southern Greece, published in "Nature".
➥ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1376-z

[GordMay]

July 11

1405: Chinese fleet commander Zheng He sets sail, on his first major expedition, to the Spice Islands, leading 208 vessels, including 62 treasure ships, with 27,800 sailors.

1663: Oxford mathematician John Wallis gives a lecture on Euclid’s parallel postulate, first Western attempt to derive the parallel postulate, as a theorem.

1776: Captain James Cook begins his third voyage.

1804: Outraged over disparaging remarks that former Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton had, allegedly, made at a dinner party, Vice President of the United States Aaron Burr challenged his longtime rival to a duel, and he fatally shot Hamilton, in Weehawken, New Jersey.

1811: Italian scientist Amedeo Avogadro publishes his memoir on the molecular content of gases.

1877: Kate Edger becomes New Zealand’s first woman graduate, and first woman, in the British Empire, to earn a Bachelor of Arts.

1892: US Patent Office says Joseph Swan, rather than Thomas Edison, invented the electric light carbon, for the incandescent lamp.
➥ https://www.cio.com/article/2441341/...ight-bulb.html

1914: George Herman (“Babe”) Ruth played in his first major league baseball game, for the Boston Red Sox. Earns 4-3 win against the Cleveland Naps, at Fenway Park

1975: Archaeologists unearth an army of 8,000 life-size clay figures, created more than 2,000 years ago, for the Emperor Qin Shi Huang.

1979: Parts of ‘Skylab’, America’s first space station, come crashing down on Australia, and into the Indian Ocean, five years after the last manned Skylab mission ended. No one was injured.

2011: Neptune completes its first orbit since its discovery, on September 23, 1846.

2012: ‘S/2012 P 1', the fifth moon of Pluto is discovered.

2015: Mexican drug lord Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán escapes from Altiplano maximum-security prison, west of Mexico City, via a specially constructed 1.5 km tunnel from his cell, to a nearby house.

2018: Oldest stone tools, outside Africa, discovered in Lantian country, western China, estimated 2.12 million years old, made by hominins.
➥ https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05696-8

[GordMay]

July 12

1191: English King Richard I, the Lionheart, and Crusaders, defeat Saracens, in Palestine.

1630: New Amsterdam's governor buys Gull Island from Indians, for cargo, renames it Oyster Island, later known as Ellis Island.

1690: Battle of Boyne: in Ireland, Protestant King William III defeats English Catholic King James II.

1771: James Cook sails Endeavour back to Downs, England.

1776: Captain James Cook departs, with “Resolution”, for 3rd trip to Pacific Ocean.

1794: British Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson loses his right eye, at the siege of Calvi, in Corsica.

1862: President Abraham Lincoln signs into law, a measure calling for the awarding of a U.S. Army Medal of Honor, in the name of Congress, “to such noncommissioned officers and privates as shall most distinguish themselves by their gallantry in action, and other soldier-like qualities during the present insurrection.”

1916: 3rd and 4th of 4 fatal Jersey Shore shark attacks occurs at Matawan Creek when epileptic Lester Stilwell (11) is dragged into a creek and Watson Fisher (24), believing Silwell had a seizure, is bitten while retrieving the body and subsequently bleeds to death
Joseph Dunn (14) is attacked by a shark, suffering non-fatal wounds in New Jersey, the final episode in a spate of shark attacks, along the Jersey coast where 4 people died over 12 days.

1957: The U.S. surgeon general, Leroy E. Burney, reports that there is a direct link between smoking and lung cancer.

1970: Thor Heyerdahl crosses the Atlantic ocean, on the raft “Ra II”, arrives in Barbados from Morocco, after 57 days.

1974: G. Gordon Liddy, John Ehrlichman, and two others, are convicted of conspiracy and perjury, in connection with the Watergate scandal.

1979: Kiribati (formerly Gilbert Islands) declares independence from UK.

1982: FEMA promises survivors of a nuclear war will get their mail. I was so relieved!

2017: World's largest iceberg (later christened A68) breaks away from Larsen C Ice Shelf, in Antarctica, about 6,000 km² in size. It was believed to be the world’s largest iceberg while intact, although it wasn’t quite as big as the B15 iceberg, which had an area of 11,000 km², when it broke off from the Ross Ice Shelf 2000.

[GordMay]

July 13

1099: The Crusaders launch their final assault on Jerusalem.

1568: Dean of St. Paul's London, Alexander Nowell perfects a way to bottle beer.

1713: Spain and Britain sign one of the treaties of Utrecht, this one giving Gibraltar and Minorca to Britain.

1772: Captain James Cook begins 2nd voyage, aboard the “Resolution”, to the South Seas to search for Terra Australis.

1793: Jean-Paul Marat, a leader of the radical Montagnard faction during the French Revolution, was stabbed to death in his bath by Charlotte Corday, a young Girondin supporter who was subsequently guillotined.

1835: Swedish-American inventor John Ericsson files for a patent, for his screw propeller design.

1866: The “Great Eastern” begins a two week voyage, to complete a 12-year effort to lay telegraph cable across the Atlantic, between Britain and the United States.

1930: Lyudmila Pavlichenko [Lady Death], was born. She is the most successful female sniper in history, having killed 309 German soldiers during the Second World War.
1930: In the first World Cup game[s], France defeats Mexico 4-1, and the United States defeats Belgium 3-0 in the first-ever World Cup football matches, played simultaneously in host city Montevideo, Uruguay. In the first World Cup final, held on July 30, 1930, 93,000 spectators looked on, as Uruguay defeated Argentina 4–2, in a rematch of the 1928 Olympic gold medal game.

1943: Greatest tank battle in history ends, with Russia's defeat of Germany at Kursk, almost 6,000 tanks take part, 2,900 lost by Germany.

1954: In Geneva, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China and France reach an accord on Indochina, dividing Vietnam into two countries, North and South, along the 17th parallel.

1976: Court martial begins, in USSR, for Captain 3rd Rank Valery Mikhailovich Sablin. In November 1975, disillusioned by corruption and stagnation in Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union, he led a mutiny on the Soviet anti-submarine frigate, Storozhevoy. Sablin had no intent to defect, to the west. Although this crime usually carried a 15-year prison sentence, Sablin was executed on 3 August 1976. Tom Clancy, then an insurance salesman, used it as inspiration to write fictional account, “The Hunt for Red October”.

1985: The benefit concert ‘Live Aid’ was held, simultaneously, at Wembley Stadium in London, and JFK Stadium in Philadelphia; the event drew an estimated 1.5 billion television viewers and raised millions of dollars [$127m?] for famine relief in Ethiopia.
See also “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”, and “We Are the World”.

2013: Outraged and saddened after the acquittal of vigilante George Zimmerman, the Florida man who killed an unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin, in 2012, California [Oakland] resident Alicia Garza posts a message on Facebook. Her post contains the phrase "Black lives matter", which soon becomes a rallying cry and a movement throughout the United States, and around the world.

2018: Johnson & Johnson ordered to pay record $4.7 billion in damages, in talc cancer case, by jury in US state of Missouri.

[GordMay]

July 14

1099: During the First Crusade, Christian knights from Europe capture Jerusalem, after seven weeks of siege, and begin massacring the city’s Muslim and Jewish population.

1430: Joan of Arc, taken prisoner by the Burgundians, in May, is handed over to Pierre Cauchon, the bishop of Beauvais.

1698: 1698 The Darien scheme begins with five ships, bearing about 1,200 people, departing Leith, for the Isthmus of Panama.
➥ https://theconversation.com/scotland...n-panama-57441

1789: A mob of Parisian revolutionaries, and mutinous troops, storm and dismantle the Bastille, a royal fortress and prison, that had come to symbolize the tyranny of the Bourbon monarchs. This dramatic action signaled the beginning of the French Revolution, a decade of political turmoil and terror in which King Louis XVI was overthrown, and tens of thousands of people, including the king and his wife Marie Antoinette, were executed. (now celebrated as France's national day)

1798: One of the most egregious breaches of the U.S. Constitution in history becomes federal law, when Congress passes the ‘Alien and Sedition Acts’, endangering liberty in the fragile new nation. In direct violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of speech, the Sedition Act permitted the prosecution of individuals who voiced or printed what the government deemed to be malicious remarks about the president or government of the United States.

The Sedition Act and the Alien Friends Act were allowed to expire in 1800 and 1801, respectively. The Alien Enemies Act, however, remains in effect as Chapter 3; Sections 21–24 of Title 50 of the United States Code

1850: 1st public demonstration of ice made by refrigeration, by Florida physician John Gorrie.

1865: British mountaineer Edward Whymper leads the first expedition to climb the Matterhorn. Four die on the descent.

1868: Alvin J. Fellows of New Haven, Connecticut, patents the tape measure.

1881: Sheriff Pat Garrett shoots Henry McCarty, popularly known as Billy the Kid, to death, at the Maxwell Ranch, in New Mexico.

1914: American engineer Robert Goddard is granted the first patent for liquid-fueled rocket design.

1933: Nazi Germany promulgates the Law for the Protection of Hereditary Health, the beginning of the Euthanasia program.
1933: All non-Nazi parties are banned in Germany.

1960: British ethologist Jane Goodall first arrived at what became Gombe Stream National Park, inTanzania; where she conducted her groundbreaking research on chimpanzees.

1966: Eight student nurses are brutally murdered, by Richard Speck, at their group residence in Chicago, Illinois.

1992: ‘386BSD’ is released by Lynne Jolitz and William Jolitz, starting the open source operating system revolution. Linus Torvalds releases ‘Linux’ soon afterwards.

1988: The latest figures released show that the big three US auto makers Ford Motor Company, GM Motors and Chrysler, beetween them, account for 95% of the US domestic auto sales.

2007: One of the largest optical telescopes began testing, in the Canary Islands on this day. After seven years of construction, and a cost of 130 million euros, the Great Canary Telescope, on La Palma, was predicted to be powerful enough to see some of the most distant images of the universe. When it was completed it was the world's largest single-aperture optical telescope.

2008: After a $52 billion takeover deal, American beer maker, Anheuser- Busch, was taken over by the Belgian beer maker InBev. The merging of the two companies made the newly combined company, Anheuser-Busch InBev, the largest beer maker in the world.

2015: Scientists from the Large Hadron Collider announce the discovery of a new particle, called the ‘pentaquark’.

2017: Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman, and first Iranian to be awarded a Fields Medal, cited for “her outstanding contributions to the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces”, died at age 40.

[GordMay]

Also on this day, July 14, in 1976 ...
The U.K. House of Commons passed a bill to abolish the death penalty. After debating the issue for more than two months, the bill was approved by a 130-124 vote. At the time, there were 11 men on death row awaiting the noose, although the last hangings had occurred in 1962.

[GordMay]

July 15

1205: Pope Innocent III states Jews are doomed to perpetual servitudea and subjugation, due to crucifixion of Jesus.

1501: Portuguese explorer Pedro Cabral arrives back in Lisbon, after successfully discovering Brazil, and returning from India.

1606: Rembrandt van Rijn born, in Leiden, Netherlands.

1662: King Charles II charters Royal Society, in London.

1741: Alexei Chirikov sights land in Southeast Alaska. He sends men ashore in a longboat, making them the first Europeans to visit Alaska.

1789: One day after the fall of the Bastille marked the beginning of a new revolutionary regime in France, the French aristocrat, and hero of the American War for Independence, Marie-Joseph Paul Roch Yves Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, becomes the colonel-general of the National Guard of Paris, by acclamation.

1799: The Rosetta Stone is found, in the Egyptian village of Rosetta, by French Captain Pierre-François Bouchard, during Napoleon's Egyptian Campaign.

1815: Napoleon surrenders, to Captain Frederick Maitland, of HMS “Bellerophon”, at Rochefort, after his earlier defeat at the Battle of Waterloo.

1869: Margarine is patented, by Hippolye Méga-Mouriès, for use by French Navy.

1870: Hudson's Bay and Northwest Territories transferred to Canada.

1898: Camillo Golgi discovers the Golgi Apparatus (a delicate network inside cells essential for the transmission and reception of information between cells).

1916: Boeing Company (Pacific Aero) formed by William Boeing, in Seattle, Washington.

1933: Wiley Post begins 1st solo flight around the world (takes 7d and 19hrs).

1937: Buchenwald Concentration Camp opens.

1940: Physicist Donald Kerst becomes the first person to accelerate electrons, using electromagnetic induction, reaching energies of 2.3 MeV, when his betatron device (for particle acceleration) becomes operational, in Urbana, Illinois.

2006: Cofounders Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone publicly launched their online microblogging service, Twttr, and within the following decade it had more than 300 million users. Within six months after the launch, Twttr had become Twitter.

[GordMay]

July 16

0622: Muslim Era begins, Muhammad begins flight from Mecca to Medina (Hijra).

1054: Humbert of Silva Candida, cardinal and papal legate, excommunicated Michael Cerularius, patriarch of Constantinople, who retaliated by excommunicating the cardinal, which led to the schism between the churches of Rome and Constantinople.

1790: The American Congress declares that a swampy, humid, muddy and mosquito-infested site on the Potomac River, between Maryland and Virginia, will be the nation’s permanent capital. “Washington,” in the newly designated federal “District of Columbia”.

1819: Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen sets sail to explore Antarctica, for Tsar Alexander I.

1862: David Farragut appointed 1st Rear Admiral in US Navy.

1867: Joseph Monier patents reinforced concrete.

1872: Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, born.

1904: Islands of Manu'a group (Samoa) ceded to US by their chiefs.

1918: Czar Nicholas and his family are murdered, by Bolsheviks, at Ekaterinburg, Russia, bringing an end, to the three-century-old Romanov dynasty.

1945: The United States tested the first atomic bomb, at Trinity Site, near Alamogordo, New Mexico, and the following month dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in Japan.

1969: Apollo 11 lifted off from NASA's John F. Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, and four days later two of its astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, became the first humans to set foot on the Moon.

1982: CDC report on AIDS symptoms in three hemophiliacs.

1995: Amazon officially opens for business, as an online bookseller. Founder Jeff Bezos initially dubbed the business Cadabra (as in abracadabra), but after someone misheard the name as “cadaver,” Bezos decided to call his startup Amazon.

2015: Scientists reveal 1st close-up pictures of Pluto, sent by the New Horizons probe.

[GordMay]

July 17

0180: 6 inhabitants of Carthage, North Africa, executed, for being Christians. Earliest record of Christianity, in this part of the world.

1453: French forces routed the English, in the Battle of Castillon, the concluding battle of the Hundred Years' War.

1603: English explorer Walter Raleigh is arrested, by forces of King James I of England.

1774: Captain James Cook arrives in the New Hebrides (Vanuatu).

1785: France limits the importation of goods from Britain.

1801: The U.S. fleet arrives in Tripoli.

1814: Matthew Flinders publishes "A Voyage to Terra Australis", detailing his circumnavigation of Australia, first to name the continent Australia. He dies a day later.

1816: "L'Argus" accidentally discovers raft holding survivors from wrecked French frigate "Méduse." After 13 days at sea only 15 of 151 remain, the rest having been cannibalised, murdered, or committed suicide. This event was made famous by Théodore Gericault’s painting "The Raft of the Medusa".

1863: Māori forces are defeated by British troops, at Koheroa, Waikato, in the New Zealand Wars, between Maori tribes and British colonials.

1918: The “Carpathia”, the ocean liner that rescued the survivors of the “Titanic” in 1912, was sunk by a German U-boat, during World War I.

1938: Douglas "Wrong Way" Corrigan leaves NY, flying for LA, winds up in Ireland, supposedly by mistake.

1944: 2 ammunition ships [SS “Quinault Victory” and SS “E.A. Bryan”] explode, while being loaded, in Port Chicago, California, killing 320 people.

1945: Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Harry S. Truman met at the Potsdam Conference, the last Allied summit conference of World War II.

1955: Disneyland amusement park opened, in Anaheim, California.

1959: Paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey discovers partial skull of a new species of early human ancestor, Zinjanthropus boisei or 'Zinj' (now called Paranthropus boisei); lived in Africa almost 2 million years ago.

1960: American ‘U2' pilot Francis Gary Powers pleads guilty to spying charges, in a Moscow court.

2014: Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 is shot down, over Eastern Ukraine, by a Buk surface-to-air missile, launched from pro-Russian separatist-controlled territory, killing all 283 passengers and 15 crew on board

2018: Oldest evidence of bread, made from wild grains, discovered by archaeologists in 14,000 year-old dig, in the Black Desert, Jordon.