Tuesday, July 21 (IT'S MY BIRTHDAY!!! ):

1861: The first major battle of the Civil War began at Manassas Junction, Virginia, about 30 miles southwest of Washington, DC. Called the First Battle of Bull Run (First Manassas by the Confederates), it ended in a Confederate victory due in part to the disorganization and panic of untrained Union militiamen.

1865: In what was considered the first Western showdown, James 'Wild Bill' Hickok shot and killed Dave Tutt in the market square of Springfield, Missouri, over a heated poker game in which Hickok was humiliated by Tutt.

1873: Jesse James and his gang of outlaws executed the first successful robbery of a moving train in the American West near the town of Adair, Iowa. They made off with between $3,000 and $6,000.

1925: High school teacher John T. Scopes was found guilty of breaking Tennessee’s Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in publicly funded schools. He was fined $100.

1983: Vostok Station, Antarctica, recorded the world’s lowest temperature at minus-128.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

Monday, July 20:

1881: Hunkpapa Lakota Sioux leader Sitting Bull surrendered to the U.S. Army at Fort Buford, Dakota Territory, in exchange for amnesty for himself and his people five years after the death of Lt. Col. George Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

1934: A labor strike turned violent as police in Minneapolis fired upon striking truck drivers, killing two and wounding 67.

1968: More than 1,000 athletes from the United States and Canada participated in the world’s first Special Olympics at Soldier Field in Chicago.

1969: Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin became the first humans to step foot on the moon. After the successful landing of the lunar module Eagle at the Sea of Tranquility, Armstrong and Aldrin exited and made the first walk on the moon, with Armstrong famously saying 'That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.' (He later acknowledged that he meant to say "One small step for A man...", which makes better grammatical sense.)

Sunday, July 19:

1845: A fire started in a building housing a whale oil store and a candle factory in Manhattan and spread across what is now the Financial District, causing an explosion and engulfing the southern part of the city. The Great New York City Fire of 1845 destroyed about 345 buildings and killed 30 people, including four firemen.

1848: The women’s suffrage movement began in earnest in the United States with the first ever women’s rights convention held at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls. Hailed as a 'convention to discuss the social, civil, and religious condition and rights of woman,' it was organized by abolitionists Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

1903: The world’s first Tour de France concluded, with cyclist Maurice Garin winning.

1980: More than 60 countries, including the United States, Canada, Japan and China, boycotted the Summer Olympics in Moscow to protest the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan the previous year. It was one of the largest boycotts in Olympic history.

Saturday, July 18:

1804: A duel between then-U.S. Vice President Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton in Weehawken, New Jersey, ended with Hamilton being fatally wounded.

1925: Adolf Hitler’s first volume of 'Mein Kampf,' the manifesto and blueprint for his Third Reich agenda, was published.

1940: President Franklin D. Roosevelt accepted the nomination for an unprecedented third term.

1960: Harper Lee’s 'To Kill a Mockingbird' was first published.

1966: Six days of riots in Cleveland began after the White owner of the Seventy-Niners Cafe on Hough Avenue refused to give a glass of water to a Black customer as racial tension reached a fever pitch. Four Black residents were killed, 50 people were injured and over 270 arrests were made over the course of the riots.

1969: Sen. Edward 'Ted' Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, drove a car off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, into Poucha Pond after attending a party. Kennedy survived, but his passenger, 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, did not. The senator did not report the incident until 10 hours later. He received a two-month suspended jail sentence and had his driver’s license suspended for a year.

1984: Twenty-one people were killed and 19 others injured when 41-year-old James Huberty opened fire in a McDonald’s restaurant in the San Ysidro neighborhood of San Diego.

1992: Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and HTML markup language, uploaded a photo of an all-women parody band called Les Horribles Cernettes (a play on the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN), making it the first photographic image to be shared on the World Wide Web.

2013: Detroit filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection with an estimated debt of between $18 billion and $20 billion, becoming the largest municipality in the United States to do so.

2015: Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán, head of the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel, escaped from a maximum security prison near Toluca, Mexico, through a tunnel over a mile long. He was recaptured six months later.

Friday, July 17:

1945: The three leaders of the Allied nations – Winston Churchill, Harry S. Truman and Joseph Stalin – held the first meeting of the Potsdam Conference to negotiate postwar peace and reconstruction as well as what to do with Germany.

1955: Disneyland officially opened for a press preview in Anaheim, California. It opened the next day to the public.

1996: TWA Flight 800 exploded off the coast of Long Island, New York, killing all 230 aboard, shortly after takeoff from the John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City.

1998: The International Criminal Court was established in The Hague, Netherlands.

2014: Eric Garner died at age 43 from an illegal chokehold by New York City Police Department officer Daniel Pantaleo. Video of his death, with him saying 'I can’t breathe,' helped spark widespread protests over police brutality.

Thursday, July 16:

1790: The Potomac River site that became Washington, DC, was established to serve as the nation’s permanent capital by President George Washington and Congress as Washington signed the Residence Act.

1942: The Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup (Rafle du Vel’ d’Hiv) began as 13,152 Jews were arrested by the Vichy France government and held at the Vélodrome d’Hiver sports arena in Paris before being deported to concentration camps, including Auschwitz.

1945: The Manhattan Project detonated the world’s first atomic bomb at Alamogordo, New Mexico.

1951: J.D. Salinger’s 'The Catcher in the Rye' was published by Little, Brown and Co.

1969: The world watched as Apollo 11, NASA’s first mission to set astronauts on the moon, was launched from the Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Florida.

1979: Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq after President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr resigned.

1995: Amazon opened for business to the public as an online bookseller.

Wednesday, July 15:

1834: The Spanish Inquisition was definitively dissolved by a decree from Spanish queen regent María Cristina de Borbón.

1870: Georgia was permanently readmitted to the United States after the Civil War.

1942 : Nazi Germany began deporting Jews from the Netherlands to concentration camps and killing centers in Germany and Poland. Over 100,000 people from the country were sent to their deaths.

1965: The Mariner 4, reaching its closest point to Mars, took the first pictures of the surface of the red planet.

1978: The Longest Walk finally reached Washington, DC, ending a five-month pilgrimage initiated by 24 Indigenous people walking from California to the nation’s capital to bring attention to difficulties their people faced and to protest legislation introduced by Congress that would violate and impact their way of life. Thousands joined the group when it reached Washington.

1997: Italian fashion mogul Gianni Versace was murdered on the front steps of his Miami Beach mansion by Andrew Cunanan, who killed at least five people after he traveled from Minnesota to Florida.

2006: Twitter ? Now known as X ? Officially launched to the public.

Tuesday, July 14:

1789: A mob composed of revolutionary insurgents stormed and dismantled the Bastille, a medieval armory and prison in Paris.

1798: Congress passed the Sedition Act, which made it illegal for Americans to 'print, utter, or publish ... any false, scandalous, and malicious writing' about the government, which was widely condemned as a violation of First Amendment rights. It expired in 1801.

1874: A fire broke out in a predominately Jewish and Black neighborhood of Chicago known as the Cheyenne District. Over 8 hours, the fire destroyed 47 acres and burned down 812 buildings, killing 20 people.

1881: Infamous outlaw Billy the Kid was shot and killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett at Fort Sumner, New Mexico.

1933: Adolf Hitler and the Nazis issued the Law Against the Founding of New Parties, decreeing that all other political parties be abolished in Germany, making the country a one-party dictatorship.

1933: Germany passed the Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases, mandating forced sterilization of people with mental or physical disabilities and disorders.

1943: The George Washington Carver National Monument near Diamond, Missouri, was founded, becoming the first U.S. National Monument to honor a Black man.

1970: The Young Lords, a group of Puerto Rican activists, stormed and occupied the Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, New York, for 12 hours. The occupation was a protest highlighting the inadequate health care services provided to the poor neighborhood.

Monday, July 13:

1863: The New York City draft riots began as working-class citizens violently protested a federal military draft for the then ongoing American Civil War. The riots lasted for days, and hundreds of people were killed, with Black residents being a primary target.

1973: Alexander Butterfield, deputy assistant to President Richard Nixon, revealed the existence of a secret Oval Office taping system to Senate investigators.

1977: New York City experienced an electrical blackout lasting nearly 24 hours.

1985: Live Aid played simultaneously at Wembley Stadium in London and John F. Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia. The star-studded concert eventually raised hundreds of millions of dollars for famine relief in Africa.

2015: Sandra Annette Bland, a 28-year-old Black woman, was found hanged in a jail cell in Waller County, Texas.

2024: Thomas Crooks attempted to assassinate Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

Sunday, July 12:

1804: Alexander Hamilton died from an abdominal wound after his duel with U.S. Vice President Aaron Burr.

1861: A treaty was signed by the Chickasaw Nation, the Choctaw Nation and the Confederate States to form an alliance against the Union as well as a certain measure of representation and protection for the Native Americans.

1862: President Abraham Lincoln signed into law a bill creating the Medal of Honor for the U.S. Army.

1943: Soviet forces were largely able to stop the German Eastern Front offensive with a counterattack in southwest Russia.

1967: Violent riots erupted as racial tension reached a boiling point on the streets of Newark, New Jersey. The riots took place over several days and were a part of what became known as the long, hot summer of 1967, which saw more than 150 race riots across the United States. At least 26 people were killed.

2007: Two U.S. Army Apache helicopters conducted a series of airstrikes in Al-Amin al-Thaniyah, New Baghdad, against alleged armed insurgents. However, civilians were killed as collateral, including two journalists. A video of the strikes, titled 'Collateral Murder,' was leaked by Wikileaks almost three years later and led to worldwide condemnation.

Saturday, July 11:

1804: A duel between then-U.S. Vice President Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton in Weehawken, New Jersey, ended with Hamilton being fatally wounded.

1960: Harper Lee’s 'To Kill a Mockingbird' was first published.

2015: Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán, head of the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel, escaped from a maximum security prison near Toluca, Mexico, through a tunnel over a mile long. He was recaptured six months later.

Friday, July 10:

1212: The Great Fire of Southwark burned through London, tearing through Southwark and burning the London Bridge, which had just been rebuilt in stone. An estimated 3,000 people are believed to have died.

1921: Violence erupted in Belfast, Northern Ireland, between the Irish Republican Army and the British government in which 20 people were killed with at least 100 people injured and 200 homes destroyed. The event became known as Belfast’s Bloody Sunday.

1962: Volvo safety engineer Nils Bohlin of Sweden was granted a U.S. patent for his three-point seat-belt system for use in automobiles.

2019: The last Volkswagen Beetle A5 model ever produced rolled off the assembly plant in Puebla, Mexico, ending production of the modern Beetle.

Thursday, July 9:

1777: Brig. Gen. George Clinton was elected as the first governor of New York. Clinton became New York’s longest serving governor and served as the fourth vice president of the United States from 1805 to 1812.

1955: Bill Haley and His Comets’ single 'Rock Around the Clock' became the first rock ’n’ roll recording to hit No. 1 on Billboard’s pop charts.

2011: South Sudan became an a independent sovereign state from Sudan after voters overwhelmingly chose secession in a January 2011 referendum.

Wednesday, July 8:

1776: Popular tradition holds that the Liberty Bell rang out from the tower of the Pennsylvania State House (now known as Independence Hall) in Philadelphia to summon citizens and Pennsylvania delegates for the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence.

1889: Reporters Charles Dow, Edward Jones and Charles Bergstresser published the first issue of The Wall Street Journal.

1947: Roswell Army Air Field public information officer Walter Haut stated in a news release that a 'flying disc' was recovered by the military near Roswell, New Mexico. And thus, the Roswell UFO conspiracies were born.

1996: The Spice Girls released their debut single 'Wannabe' in the United Kingdom.

Tuesday, July 7:

1898: The Hawaiian Islands were annexed by the United States.

1928: Sliced bread first went on sale at the Chillicothe Baking Co. in Chillicothe, Missouri.

2005: A series of coordinated suicide bomb attacks by terrorists ripped through the London transit system in England, killing 52 and injuring more than 700 others.

Monday, July 6:

1854: Disgruntled over the issue of slavery, voters formed a viable new political party to challenge Democrats: The Republican Party of the United States.

1942: Anne Frank and her family went into hiding in Amsterdam to escape persecution by the Nazis.

1957: Paul McCartney and John Lennon met for the first time at a church event in Liverpool, England.

1995: Bosnian Serb forces began an attack on the Bosniak ethnic group in the town of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The resulting massacre killed more than 7,000 Bosniak Muslim boys and men.

Sunday, July 5:

1946: French engineer and fashion designer Louis Réard revealed to the world the first modern bikini at Piscine Molitor, a public pool in Paris.

1989: The TV show 'Seinfeld' debuted on NBC.

1996: Dolly, a sheep who was the first successfully cloned mammal from an adult cell, was born in the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh, Scotland. She lived to be 6 years old and had six offspring.

Saturday, July 4:

1776: The Declaration of Independence was unanimously adopted by the 56 delegates of the Second Continental Congress.

1802: The U.S. Military Academy was formally established at West Point, New York.

1817: Construction of the Erie Canal began in Rome, New York.

1884: The Statue of Liberty was presented to the United States by France in a ceremony in Paris as a symbolic gesture of friendship between the two nations.

1966: President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Freedom of Information Act into law, which allows the American public to request and access federal agency records and documents, save for exemptions pertaining to national security and personal privacy.

2025: More than 130 people died in flash flooding in Texas Hill Country, including 27 campers and counselors at Camp Mystic along the Guadalupe River.

Friday, July 3:

1775: George Washington assumed command of the Continental Army in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1863: The Battle of Gettysburg ended. Over 7,000 Confederate soldiers were captured or killed.

1884: The world’s first stock index, launched as Dow Jones & Co., published its first stock average.

Thursday, July 2:

1839: On the Cuban slave ship Amistad, Joseph Cinqué led a group of enslaved Africans in a mutiny against their captors, killing the captain and a cook.

1962 : Sam Walton opened the first Walmart in Rogers, Arkansas.

1964: President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law.

Wednesday, July 1:

1847: The first general-issue postage stamps were released by the U.S. Post Office.

1867: The British North America Act came into effect, uniting the separate territories of the Province of Canada, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia into one dominion called Canada. The act also divided the Province of Canada into Ontario and Quebec.

1979: Sony debuted the Walkman, the first personal stereo cassette player, for sale in Japan.

Tuesday, June 30:

1905: A German physics journal published Albert Einstein’s paper that included his theory on special relativity, the relationship between energy and matter, which is expressed in the equation, E=mc2.

1951: On Anatahan in the Northern Mariana Islands, U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. James Johnson of the USS Cocopa accepted the surrender of 20 stranded Japanese soldiers. The soldiers had refused to believe World War II ended in 1945.

Monday, June 29:

1776: Citing the 'detestable and insupportable Tyranny' of British rule under King George III, the Virginia Convention adopted the first constitution of the independent Commonwealth of Virginia.

2000: TV producer Norman Lear purchased a 1776 copy of the U.S. Declaration of Independence for $8.14 million in a Sotheby’s online auction, which at the time was the most expensive item sold online.

2007: Apple Inc. began selling its first-generation iPhone.

Sunday, June 28:

1776: American revolutionaries scored their first decisive victory against the British Royal Navy when they repelled an attack in the Battle of Sullivan’s Island near what became Charleston, South Carolina.

1914: Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, were assassinated in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo, a double fatal shooting by a Serbian nationalist that helped fuel the start of World War I.

1919: World War I formally ended after Germany and the Allied powers ratified the Treaty of Versailles in Paris.

1969: New York police executing a search warrant raided an LGBTQ+ bar called the Stonewall Inn. Protesters converged on the area the next night with fighting that lasted into the next week.

1970: The first Gay Pride marches in the United States were organized one year after the Stonewall Uprising.

Saturday, June 27:

1895: The first U.S. passenger train with an electric locomotive was the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad’s Royal Blue Line, which made its initial trip to New York City from the nation’s capital.

1957: Hundreds of people died near the Louisiana-Texas border after Hurricane Audrey made landfall between Sabine Pass and Johnsons Bayou in Louisiana. Audrey remains one of the strongest June hurricanes and is among the deadliest in U.S. history.

1991: Yugoslavia started the 10-Day War with an invasion of Slovenia, which had declared its independence. The first of six republics to secede from Yugoslavia, Slovenia would turn away the Yugoslav People’s Army, fueling other Yugoslav Wars.

2002: At a summit in Canada, the Group of Eight leading industrialized nations finalized an aid package to help Russia decommission its weapons of mass destruction over the next decade. In 2014, the G8 suspended Russia from the alliance, which is now called the Group of 20.