Gordon Jones

On July 31, 1715, a fleet of Spanish ships carrying gold, silver and jewelry sank during a hurricane off the east Florida coast.

In 1777, during the Revolutionary War, the Marquis de Lafayette, a 19-year-old French nobleman, was made a major-general in the American Continental Army.

In 1919, Germany’s Weimar Constitution was adopted by the republic of Germany.

In 1941, Hermann Göring, writing under instructions from Hitler, ordered Reinhard Heydrich, SS general and Heinrich Himmler’s number-two man, “to submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution of the Jewish question.”

In 1970, “The Huntley- Brinkley Report” came to an end as co-anchor Chet Huntley signed off; the broadcast was renamed “NBC Nightly News.”

In 1971, James Taylor went to No.1 on the US singles chart with the Carole King song ‘You’ve Got A Friend’, (included in her album Tapestry and James Taylor’s album Mud Slide Slim). The song would go on to win the 1971 Grammy Award for Best Pop Vocal male Performance and Song Of The Year.

In 2014, the death toll from the worst Ebola outbreak in history surpassed 700 in West Africa.

On July 30, 1619, the first representative assembly in America convened in Jamestown.

In 1954, Slim Whitman, Billy Walker, Sugarfoot Collins, Sonny Harvelle, Tinker Fry, Curly Harris and a young Elvis Presley all appeared at the Hillbilly Hoedown, Overton Park Shell, in Memphis Tennessee. Elvis was so nervous he stood up on the balls of his feet and shook his leg in time with the music, when he came offstage he asked why people were yelling at him. Someone told him it was because he was shaking his leg, which with the baggy pleated pants created a wild gyrating effect in time with the music.

In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a measure making “In God We Trust” the national motto, replacing “E Pluribus Unum.”

In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed a measure creating Medicare, which began operating the following year.

In 1975,Jimmy Hoffa disappeared in suburban Detroit; although presumed dead, his remains have never been found.

In 2003, the last of 21,529,464 Volkswagen Beetles built since World War II rolls off the production line at Volkswagen’s plant in Puebla, Mexico.

Also in 2003, President George W. Bush took personal responsibility for the first time for using discredited intelligence in his State of the Union address. And also in 2003, Sam Phillips the founder of Sun Records and studio died of respiratory failure at St. Francis Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee. In the 1940s, Phillips worked as a DJ for Muscle Shoals, Alabama radio station WLAY. Phillips recorded what some consider to be the first rock and roll record, ‘Rocket 88’ by Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats in 1951. He discovered Elvis Presley, worked with Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Ike Turner, B.B. King and Jerry Lee Lewis.

On July 29, 1856, German composer Robert Schumann died in Endenich at age 46.

In 1890, artist Vincent van Gogh, 37, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Auvers-sur-Oise, France.

In 1914, transcontinental telephone service in the U.S. became operational with the first test conversation between New York and San Francisco. Also: Massachusetts’ Cape Cod Canal, offering a shortcut across the base of the peninsula, was officially opened to shipping traffic.

In 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act, creating NASA.

In 1965, the Beatles’ second film, “Help!,” had its world premiere in London.

In 1978, the Grease soundtrack hits #1 in the US, thanks to the hits “You’re the One That I Want” and “Summer Nights.”

In 1981, Britain’s Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer in a glittering ceremony at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London.

On July 28, 1540, King Henry VIII’s chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, was executed, the same day Henry married his fifth wife, Catherine Howard.

In 1821, Peru declared its independence from Spain.

in 1868, following its ratification by the necessary three-quarters of U.S. states, the 14th Amendment, granting citizenship to all persons born or naturalized in the United States—including formerly enslaved people—is officially adopted into the U.S. Constitution.

In 1914, World War I began as Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia.

In 1932, federal troops dispersed the World War I veterans who had gathered in Washington to demand payments they weren’t scheduled to receive until 1945.

In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced the end of coffee rationing, which had limited people to one pound of coffee every five weeks since it began in November 1942.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton accepts Democratic nomination for president, becoming first woman to lead a major U.S. political party.

On July 27, 1866, Cyrus W. Field finished laying out the first successful underwater telegraph cable between North America and Europe (a previous cable in 1858 burned out after a few weeks’ use).

In 1909, during the first official test of the U.S. Army’s first airplane, Orville Wright flew himself and a passenger, Lt. Frank Lahm, above Fort Myer, Virginia, for one hour and 12 minutes.

In 1921, researcher Frederick Banting and his assistant, Charles Best, succeeded in isolating the hormone insulin at the University of Toronto.

In 1953, the Korean War armistice was signed at Panmunjom.

In 1960, Vice President Richard M. Nixon was nominated as the Republican presidental candidate.

In 1974, the House Judiciary Committee recommends that America’s 37th president, Richard M. Nixon, be impeached and removed from office.

in 1976, Tina Turner filed for divorce from her husband Ike, ending their violent 16-year marriage and successful musical partnership.

in 1981, Adam John Walsh, age 6, is abducted from a mall in Hollywood, Florida, and later found murdered. later found murdered.

In 1986, Queen  became the first western act since Louis Armstrong in 1964 to perform in Easten Europe when they played at Budapest’s Nepstadion, Hungary, the gig was filmed and released as ‘Queen Magic in Budapest’.

In 2015, the Boy Scouts of America ended its ban on gay adult leaders while allowing church-sponsored Scout units to maintain the exclusion for religious reasons.

On July 26, 1775, the Continental Congress established a Post Office and appointed Benjamin Franklin its Postmaster-General.

In 1788, New York became the 11th state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.

In 1847, the western African country of Liberia, founded by freed American slaves, declared its independence.

In 1908, U.S. Attorney General Charles J. Bonaparte ordered creation of a force of special agents, forerunner of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act.

In 2002, the Homeland Security Department was created in the biggest government reorganization in decades.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton became the first woman to be nominated for president by a major political party.

In 1898, the United States invaded Puerto Rico in the Spanish-American War.

In 1952, Puerto Rico became a self-governing commonwealth of the United States.

In 1956, at 11:10 p.m., 45 miles south of Nantucket Island, the Italian ocean liner Andrea Doria and the Swedish ocean liner Stockholm collide in a heavy Atlantic fog.

In 1960, Roy Orbison reached No.2 on the US singles chart with ‘Only the Lonely,’ his first hit. The song was turned down by The Everly Brothers and Elvis Presley, so Orbison decided to record the song himself.

In 1972, The Associated Press reported that for the previous four decades, the U.S. Public Health Service and Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute had been allowing poor, rural Black male patients with syphilis to go without treatment, even die, to study the disease.

In 1978, Louise Joy Brown, the world’s first baby to be conceived via in vitro fertilization (IVF) is born at Oldham and District General Hospital in Manchester, England, to parents Lesley and Peter Brown.

In 1985, Rock Hudson, a Hollywood leading man of the 1950s and 1960s who made more than 60 films during his career, announces through a press release that he is suffering from acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS).

In 2010, the online whistleblower Wikileaks posted some 90,000 leaked U.S. military records, that amounted to a blow-by-blow account of the Afghanistan war, including unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killing and covert operations.

On July 24, 1567, Mary, Queen of Scots was forced to abdicate by Scottish nobles in favor of her infant son James.

In 1847, Mormon leader Brigham Young along with his followers arrived in the Great Salt Lake Valley in present-day Utah.

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.

In 1866, Tennessee became the first state readmitted to the Union following the Civil War.

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 1978, the film Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band opens in America, and it tanks hard. Savaged by critics, it becomes a legendary Hollywood flop despite appearances by Peter Frampton, Billy Preston, Aerosmith and The Bee Gees.

On July 23, 1829, William Austin Burt received a patent for his “typographer,” a forerunner of the typewriter.

In 1952, in Egypt, the Society of Free Officers seizes control of the government in a military coup d’etat staged by Colonel Gamal Abdal Nasser’s Free Officers.

In 1958, Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II named the first four women to peerage in the House of Lords.

In 1982, Vic Morrow and two child actors, Renee Shinn Chen and Myca Dinh Le, are killed in an accident involving a helicopter during filming on the California set of Twilight Zone: The Movie.

In 1983, an Air Canada Boeing 767 ran out of fuel while flying; the pilots were able to glide the jetliner to a safe emergency landing. (The near-disaster occurred because the fuel had been measured in pounds instead of kilograms.)

In 1990, President George H.W. Bush announced his choice of Judge David Souter of New Hampshire to succeed the retiring Justice William J. Brennan on the U.S. Supreme Court.

In 1999, shuttle Columbia took off with the world’s most powerful X-ray telescope and Eileen Collins, the first woman in charge of a U.S. space flight.