Month: July 2022 (Page 2 of 5)

This Day in History | July 19th

On July 19, 1799, during Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign, a French soldier discovers the Rosetta Stone.

In 1848, a pioneering women’s rights convention convened in Seneca Falls, New York.

In 1961, TWA became the first airline to begin showing regularly scheduled in-flight movies as it presented “By Love Possessed” in first class.

In 1980, the Moscow Summer Olympics began, minus dozens of nations that were boycotting the games because of the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan.

In 1990, baseball’s all-time hits leader, Pete Rose, was sentenced to five months in prison for tax evasion.

In 1993, President Bill Clinton announced a policy dubbed “don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t pursue” that prevented the military from asking recruits about sexual identity but barred entry to those who engaged in “homosexual conduct.”

This Day in History | July 18th

On July 18, 1536, the English Parliament passed an act declaring the authority of the pope void in England.

In 1872, Britain enacted voting by secret ballot.

In 1940, the Democratic National Convention nominated President Franklin D. Roosevelt for an unprecedented third term in office.

In 1964, rioting erupted in New York’s Harlem neighborhood following the fatal police shooting of a Black teenager, James Powell, two days earlier.

In 1969, shortly after leaving a party on Chappaquiddick Island, Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy of Massachusetts drives an Oldsmobile off a wooden bridge into a tide-swept pond. Kennedy escaped the submerged car, but his passenger, 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, did not. The senator did not report the fatal car accident for 10 hours.

In 1976, 14-year-old Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci, competing at the Montreal Olympics, received the first-ever perfect score of 10 with her routine on uneven parallel bars. (Comaneci would go on to receive six more 10s in Montreal.)

In 1984, James Oliver Huberty opens fire in a crowded McDonald’s restaurant in San Ysidro, California, killing 21 people and wounding 19 others with several semi-automatic weapons. Minutes earlier, Huberty had left home, telling his wife, “I’m going hunting…hunting for humans.”

This Day in History | July 17th

On July 17, 1821, Spain ceded Florida to the U.S.

In 1862, Congress passed the Second Confiscation Act, which said that all slaves taking refuge behind Union lines during the Civil War were to be set free.

In 1918, the Bolsheviks executed Russia’s Czar Nicholas II and his family.

In 1936, the Spanish Civil War began as right-wing army generals launched a coup attempt against the Second Spanish Republic.

In 1955, Disneyland, Walt Disney’s metropolis of nostalgia, fantasy and futurism, opens. The $17 million theme park was built on 160 acres of former orange groves in Anaheim, California, and soon brought in staggering profits.

In 1962, the United States conducted its last atmospheric nuclear test to date, detonating a 20-kiloton device, codenamed Little Feller I, at the Nevada Test Site.

In 1967, after seven dates, Jimi Hendrix quit as opening act for the Monkees.

In 1997, Woolworth Corp. announced it was closing after 117 years in business.

In 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17was shot down over the Ukraine-Russia border.

This Day in History | July 16th

On July 16, 1790, a site along the Potomac River was designated the permanent seat of the United States government.

In 1909, the Audi auto company was founded in Zwickau, Germany, by August Horch.

In 1945, the United States exploded its first experimental atomic bomb in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

In 1951, the novel “The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger was first published.

In 1969, Apollo 11 blasted off from Cape Kennedy on the first manned mission to the surface of the moon.

In 2002, the Irish Republican Army issued an unprecedented apology for the deaths of “noncombatants” over 30 years of violence in Northern Ireland.

In 2004, Martha Stewart was sentenced to five months in prison for lying about a stock sale.

This Day in History | July 15th

On July 15, 1870, Georgia became the last Confederate state to be readmitted to the Union.

In 1903, the newly formed Ford Motor Company takes its first order from Chicago dentist Ernst Pfenning: an $850 two-cylinder Model A automobile with a tonneau (or backseat). The car, produced at Ford’s plant on Mack Street (now Mack Avenue) in Detroit, was delivered to Dr. Pfenning just over a week later.

In 1910, the term “Alzheimer’s disease” was used to describe a progressive form of presenile dementia in the book “Clinical Psychiatry” by German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, who credited the work of his colleague, Alois Alzheimer, in identifying the condition.

In 1913, Augustus Bacon, D-Ga., became the first elected to the U.S. Senate under the 17th Amendment providing for popular election of senators.

In 1916, Boeing Co., originally known as Pacific Aero Products Co., was founded in Seattle.

In 1971, Nixon announces visit to communist China.

In 1985, a visibly gaunt Rock Hudson appeared at a news conference with co-star Doris Day (it was later revealed Hudson was suffering from AIDS).

In 1997, fashion designer Gianni Versace, 50, was shot dead.

In 2006, the San Francisco-based podcasting company Odeo officially releases Twttr—later changed to Twitter—its short messaging service (SMS) for groups, to the public.

This Day in History | July 14th

On July 14, 1789, 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.

In 1798, Congress passed the Sedition Act, criminalizing publishing false, scandalous or malicious writing about the United States government.

In 1881, outlaw William H. Bonney Jr., alias “Billy the Kid,” was shot and killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett in present-day New Mexico.

In 1914, scientist Robert H. Goddard received a U.S. patent for a liquid-fueled rocket apparatus.

In 1918, Quentin Roosevelt, a pilot in the United States Air Service and the fourth son of former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, is shot down and killed by a German Fokker plane over the Marne River in France.

In 1933, all German political parties, except the Nazi Party, were outlawed.

In 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a measure for a monument honoring scientist George Washington Carver..

In 1980, Ronald Reagan told the Republican national convention he and his supporters were determined to “make America great again.”

In 1978, Tom Jones lost a paternity suit and was ordered to pay $200 a week in child support to 27 year old Katherine Berkery of New York. The judge in the case was Judge Judy Sheindlin, who was still serving in her 15 year tenure as a New York Family Court judge before appearing in her court TV show, Judge Judy.

In 2014, the Church of England voted to allow women to become bishops.

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