By CABPRO Staff
July 1, 1863 – Battle of Gettysburg begins during the Civil War.
July 2, 1881 – President James Garfield (20th) was shot in Washington, DC; he died later, September 19, 1881.
July 2, 1937 – American aviator Amelia Earhart and her navigator went missing over the Pacific during an attempt to fly around the world.
July 4, 1776 – Independence Day!!. The Declaration of Independence was accepted and signed in Philadelphia. Fly the Stars and Stripes!!
July 4, 1826 - Presidents John Adams (2nd) and Thomas Jefferson (3rd) died on the same day.
July 6, 1921 – Former First Lady Nancy Reagan was born in New York City.
July 6, 1946 – President George W. Bush (43rd) was born in New Haven, CT.
July 8, 1776 – The Liberty Bell rang in Philadelphia summoning citizens to the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence.
July 10, 1863 – The siege on Battery Wagner by Union troops began during the Civil War; it ended September 17, 1863, when the Confederates evacuated the fort.
July 11, 1804 – Vice-President Aaron Burr fatally shot Federalist Alexander Hamilton in a duel, or an “affair of honor,” at Weehawken, New Jersey.
July 12, 1862 – President Abraham Lincoln (16th) signed law creating the U.S. Army Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military honor.
July 12, 1881 – Henry McCarty, aka “Billy the Kid,” was shot to death by Sheriff Pat Garrett at the Maxwell Ranch in New Mexico, after tracking him for three months.
July 12, 1968 – Hank Aaron hit his 500th home run.
July 15, 1903 – The new Ford Motor Company took its first order from a Chicago dentist: a $850 two-cylinder Model A with a tonneau (back seat). The buyer took delivery about a week later.
July 15, 1968 – President Richard Nixon (37th) announced that he would visit communist China; the historic “journey for peace” took place in 1972.
July 16, 1790 – Congress declared Washington, DC the nation’s first capital.
July 16, 1935 – The world’s first parking meter was installed in Oklahoma City; cost was a nickel per hour.
July 16, 1945 – The first atomic bomb was successfully tested in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
July 16, 1969 – Apollo 11, the first American lunar landing mission launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
July 17, 1938 – Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan crossed the Atlantic in his refurbished 1929 Curtiss Robin aircraft.
July 18, 1921 – American Astronaut John Glenn was born in Cambridge, OH.
July 18, 1969 – Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy drove off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island and failed to notify authorities for 10 hours; his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, drowned.
July 19, 1779 – Massachusetts launched an ill-fated 4,000 man naval expedition in order to capture a British garrison at Castine on the Penobscot peninsula, in what is now Maine; considered to be the worst U.S. naval disaster prior to Pearl Harbor.
July 20, 1969 – American astronaut Neil Armstrong was the first man to walk on the moon.
July 20, 1976 – The Viking 1 lander, an unmanned U.S. planetary probe, was the first spacecraft to successfully land on Mars.
July 21, 1863 – The First Battle of Bull Run began. General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson gained his nickname at this important early Civil War battle, won by the Confederates.
July 21, 1948 – Amidst increasing Cold War tensions with the Soviet Union, President Harry Truman (33rd) instituted a peacetime draft, calling up nearly 10 million men.
July 22, 1916 – Preparedness Day parade suitcase bombing in San Francisco killed ten and injured 40 more during WWI.
July 22, 1933 – American aviator Wiley Post completed the firsts solo around the world flight landing at Floyd Bennett Field in New York: 7 days, 18 hours and 49 minutes.
July 24, 1832 – Benjamin Bonneville led the first wagon train across the Rockies via South Pass, from Wyoming into British-dominated Oregon Territory; this would become a critical link in the Oregon Trail.
July 26, 1776 – Congress established the U.S. Post Office naming Benjamin Franklin the first U.S. Postmaster General.
July 27, 1953 – Armistice formally ended the three-year Korean War.
July 28, 1965 – President Lyndon Johnson (36th) sent 50,000 ground troops to Vietnam.
July 29, 1958 – NASA was established by Congress, signaling a commitment to win the ‘space race’ with the Soviet Union.
July 30, 1945 – The Japanese torpedoed and sank the USS Indianapolis, a U.S. heavy cruiser, in the Pacific between Guam and Leyte Gulf in the Philippines. The ship had already delivered key components of the atomic bomb, to be dropped a week later on Hiroshima, to Tinian Island.
July 30, 1956 – President Eisenhower (34th) signed P.L. 84-140, declaring “In God We Trust” to be the nation’s official motto, and that it be printed on all American paper currency.