This Week in History 7/25 – 7/31

This Week in History

July 25:

• English engineer George Stephenson introduces the first steam locomotive (1814)
• First Council of Nicea ended after drafting formula for Easter dates and Nicene Creed (325)
• Writer Jack London sails to join the Klondike Gold Rush where he will write his first successful stories (1897)
• The first commercial use of an electric telegraph in London (1837)
• At Club 500 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis stage their first show as a comedy team (1946)
• WW2: Benito Mussolini dismissed as Italian Premier and arrested on the authority of King Victor Emmanuel III (1943)
• The Three Years War begins along the Maine and Massachusetts border (1722)
• US Congress forms Wyoming Territory taking land out of Dakota, Utah & Idaho (1868)
• War of 1812: Battle of Niagara Falls where Americans defeat British (1814)
• North Carolina becomes a royal colony (1729)
• Explosion at Lake Erie & Cleveland Waterworks (1916)
• Army refused to overturn 127 year old conviction against Dr Mudd, conspirator in Lincoln assassination (1992)
• James VI of Scotland is crowned James I of English uniting kingdoms of England and Scotland (1603)
• Constantine I is proclaimed Roman Emperor by his troops (306 AD)
• First US troops land & occupy Puerto Rice, at Guanica Bay (1898)
• Louise Brown, the world’s first test tube baby is born at Oldham General Hospital in England (1978)

July 26:

• Birth of United States Post Office under Benjamin Franklin (1775)
• FBI founded (1908)
• William Wilberforce, the man who fought to rid Great Britain of slavery, heard that the act to end slavery had been passed as he lie on his deathbed (1833)
• WW2: Declaration of Potsdam is issued when US, Britain and China demand the Japanese surrender (1945)
• J. Edgar Hoover gets job in US Department of Justice (1917)
• Chinese government suspends the operations of a Shanghai meat dealer and makes arrests after the company sold out-of-date meat to fast food chains, including McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken (2014)
• Fidel Castro begins rebellion, the “26th of July Movement,” against Fulgenico Batista’s regime in Cuba (1953)
• President Harry Truman orders desegregation of all US forces (1946)
• The Liberian Declaration of Independence is signed making Liberia a sovereign nation, independent from the American Colonization Society (1847)
• National Bar Association incorporates (1926)
• In England, the Disestablishment Bill was passed, officially dissolving the Church of Ireland. Those who defended Church of Ireland became known as the longest word in English dictionary – antidisestablishmentarianism (1869)
• First automobile trip across the United States from San Francisco to New York City completed by Horatio Nelson Jackson and Sewall K. Crocker (1903)
• New York becomes 11th state to ratify US constitution (1788)
• US President George H.W. Bush signs Americans With Disabilities Act (1990)
• In California, the poet and American West outlaw calling himself “Black Bart” makes his last clean getaway when he steals a safe box from a Wells Fargo stagecoach (1878)

July 27:

• Jesuit priest Francis Xavier’s ship reaches Japan where he becomes the first Christian missionary in Japan (1549)
• Bugs Bunny debuts in Wild Hare (1940)
• Orville Wright tests first US Army airplane (1909)
• Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolate insulin at the University of Toronto (1921)
• US Congress establishes Department of Foreign Affairs – State Department (1789)
• 8.2 Tangshan earthquake kills estimated 240,000 Chinese (1976)
• US Mint opens in Charlotte, NC (1837)
• Fire Destroys US Mint in Charlotte, NC (1844)
• Korean War ends with armistice (1953)
• US House begins impeachment of President Nixon (1974)
• Sir Walter Raleigh brings first tobacco to England from Virginia (1589)
• President Lyndon B. Johnson signs a bill requiring cigarette makers to print health warnings on all cigarette packages about the effects of smoking (1965)
• US Communist Party forms (1945)
• Adam John Walsh is abducted at the age of six leading his father to begin lifelong campaign to protect children and champion victim’s rights (1981)
• Scottish preacher Donald Cargill executed for leading Christians in Scotland to make a covenant with God (1681)
• Martin Luther King Jr. jailed in Albany Georgia (1962)
• Bob Hope dies at 100 (2003)
• WW2: Stalin issues Order 227 outlawing cowards (1943)
• President Lyndon B. Johnson signs a bill requiring cigarette makers to print health warnings on all cigarette packages about the effects of smoking (1965)

July 28:

• 14th Amendment guaranteeing African Americans citizenship is adopted (1868)
• Silent Parade organized by James Weldon Johnson of 10,000 African-American march on 5th Ave in NYC protesting against lynching (1917)
• Nine coal miners trapped in the flooded Quecreek Mine in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, are rescued after 77 hours underground (2002)
• Military plane flies into Empire State Building killing 14 (1945)
• Walt Disney movie Alice In Wonderland released (1951)
• Total solar eclipse captured on a daguerreotype photograph (1851)
• WW1: Austria-Hungary decides against mediation and declares war on Serbia – first declaration of war (1914)
• WW2: Italian Facist dictator Benito Mussolini resigns (1943)
• First use of fingerprints as a means of identification is made by Sir William James Herschel of the Indian Civil Service (1858)
• Vietnam War: LBJ sends 50,000 more soldiers to Vietnam (1965)
• Battle between unemployed war veterans & federal troops, 4 die (1932)
• French Revolution: Robespierre & 22 other leaders of “the Terror” guillotined to thunderous cheers in Paris (1794)
• US Senate approves United Nations Charter (1945)
• Sir Thomas Harriot introduces potatoes to Europe on return to England (1586)
• City of Miami incorporated (1896)
• WW2: In Operation Gomorrah, the British bomb Hamburg causing a firestorm that kills 42,000 German civilians (1943)
• Mob hitman Mad Dog Coll allegedly participates in a kidnapping attempt that results in the shooting death of a child (1931)

July 29:

• U.S. Army Chaplaincy was founded (1775)
• First schoolhouse west of Allegheny Mountains completed by Moravians in Schoenbrunn, Ohio and allows boys, girls, and Native Americans to attend (1773)
• WW2: Adolf Hitler becomes leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party (1921)
• WW2: After delivering the Atomic Bomb across the Pacific, the cruiser USS Indianapolis is torpedoed & sunk by a Japanese submarine (1945)
• NASA created (1958)
• Airlift in West-Germany to West-Berlin ends (1949)
• Robert A. Jaffray, missionary to southeast Asia died in a Japanese prison camp. At the start of the war, he refused to return to native Canada and safety to continue preaching in Asia. (1945)
• Publication of “Fellowship of the Ring” first volume of “Lord of the Rings” by J. R. R. Tolkien by by George Allen and Unwin in London (1954)
• Astronomers announce their discovery of dwarf planet Eris (2005)
• US Civil War: Confederate spy Belle Boyd is arrested by Union troops and detained at the Old Capitol Prison in Washington, DC (1864)
• Spanish Armada defeat (1588)
• First eleven women priests in the Episcopal Church were ordained (1974)
• Publication of Fellowship of the Rings, first in Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954)
• Walt Disney’s Steamboat Willie debuting Mickey Mouse released (1928)
• Nathaniel Bacon declared a rebel for assembling frontiersmen to protect settlers from Indians (1676)
• 200,000 Muslims demand the death of feminist writer Taslima Nasrin in Bangladesh (1994)

July 30:

• First Penguin book is published, starting the paperback revolution (1935)
• James Varick becomes first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church (1822)
• Mahlon Loomis patents wireless telegraphy (1872)
• First legislative assembly in America, House of Burgess, in Jamestown, Virginia (1619)
• New Orleans’s Democratic government orders police to raid an integrated Republican Party meeting, killing 40 people and injuring 150 (1866)
• In God We Trust became the official U.S. motto (1956)
• Will Kellogg invents Corn Flakes (1898)
• Wright Brothers deliver first military plane to the army (1909)
• George Eastman shows first color motion pictures (1928)
• US Indian Wars: Chief Pocatello of the Shoshone tribe signs the Treaty of Box Elder, promising to stop harassing the emigrant trails in southern Idaho and northern Utah (1863)
• City of Baltimore founded (1729)
• Anti-Jewish rioters attack funeral procession of Rabbi Joseph in New York City (1902)
• US Civil War: President Lincoln issues “eye-for-eye” order to shoot a rebel prisoner for every black prisoner shot (1863)
• US President Johnson signs Medicare bill (1965)

July 31:

• US Revolutionary War: Francis Salvador became the first Jew to die for American independence (1776)
• The complete New American Standard Version of the Bible (NASB) was first published (1970)
• Pilgrim Fathers depart Leiden for England before heading to America (1620)
• US Coast Guard officers’ training school established (1876)
• WW1: German Emperor Wilhelm II threatens war, orders Russia to demobilize (1914)
• WW2: Tokyo Japan is awarded the 1940 Olympics which is later cancelled (1936)
• Israel welcomes its 1,000,000th immigrant (1961)
• Hurricane sinks Spanish treasure ships (1715)
• WW1: German SS gases 1,000 Jews in Minsk, Belorussian (1942)
• Battle of Alexandria results in Marc Anthony committing suicide (33 BC)
• Fire in Stockholm destroys 1,000 houses (1751)
• US government prohibits movies & photos of prize fights (1912)
• Department of Health, Education & Welfare created (1953)
• Jimmy Hoffa disappears (1975)