2009 – Kim Jong-il meets former president Bill Clinton. He pardons and releases captured American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling who were found guilty of entering the country illegally.
1181 – Supernova SN 1181 in the constellation Cassiopeia observed by Chinese and Japanese astronomers, lasting until August 6
1666 – Hurricane hits Guadeloupe, Martinique and St Christopher; thousands die
1735 – Freedom of the press was established with an acquittal of John Peter Zenger. The writer of the New York Weekly Journal had been charged with seditious libel by the royal governor of New York. The jury said that “the truth is not libelous.”
1753 – George Washington became a Master Mason.
1777 – Retired British cavalry officer Philip Astley establishes his riding school with performances in London, precursor of the circus
1790 – The Revenue Cutter Service was formed. This U.S. naval task force was the beginning of the U.S. Coast Guard.
1821 – “The Saturday Evening Post” was published for the first time as a weekly.
1821 – Russian Antarctic expedition led by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen returns to Kronshtadt after becoming the 1st to circumnavigate Antarctica
1873 – Indian Wars: whilst protecting a railroad survey party in Montana, US 7th Cavalry, under Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, clashes for the 1st time with the Sioux near the Tongue River. 1 man killed on each side.
1892 – Sunday school teacher Lizzie Borden’s father and stepmother are murdered with an axe in Fall River, Massachusetts; Borden is later arrested, tried and acquitted
1900 – An allied expeditionary force, made up of Japanese, Russian, British, French and American troops, sets off from Tientsin for Peking, China, to put down Boxer rebellion
1914 – WWI: German army shoots Belgian priests and burns down village of Battice
1930 – Child labor laws established in Belgium
1944 – Nazi police raided a house in Amsterdam and arrested eight people. Anne Frank, a teenager at the time, was one of the people arrested. Her diary would be published after her death.
1948 – 5 day Southern States filibuster succeeds in maintaining America’s poll tax
1952 – Gambling boss Theodore Roe is murdered by the crew of Sam Giancana
1954 – The uranium rush began in Saskatchewan, Canada.
1955 – Eisenhower authorizes $46 million for construction of CIA headquarters
1964 – Bodies of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James E. Chaney discovered in an earthen Mississippi dam
1964 – North Vietnam purportedly engage US Navy ships in the Gulf of Tonkin for a second time, resulting in US Congress passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, granting authority to assist any Southeast Asian facing “communist aggression”; later investigation deemed the second attack never happened as shipboard communications were misinterpreted
1972 – Uganda dictator Idi Amin orders the expulsion of 50,000 Asians with British passport from Uganda
1972 – Arthur Bremer was found guilty of shooting George Wallace, the governor of Alabama. Bremer was sentenced to 63 years in prison.
1977 – U.S. President Carter signed the measure that established the Department of Energy.
1983 – A military coup in Upper Volta installed Thomas Sankara, a captain in the Upper Volta Army as its president. A year later, he changed the name of Upper Volta to Burkina Faso.
1984 – Upper Volta, an African republic, changed its name to Burkina Faso.
1986 – The United States Football League called off its 1986 season. This was after winning only token damages in its antitrust lawsuit against the National Football League.
1987 – The Fairness Doctrine was rescinded by the Federal Communications Commission. The doctrine had required that radio and TV stations present controversial issues in a balanced fashion.
1990 – The European Community imposed an embargo on oil from Iraq and Kuwait. This was done to protest the Iraqi invasion of the oil-rich Kuwait.
1993 – Rwandian Hutus and Tutsis sign peace treaty in Arusha, Tanzania
1994 – Yugoslavia withdrew its support for Bosnian Serbs. The border between Yugoslavia and Serb-held Bosnia was sealed.
1995 – Operation Storm begins in Croatia, the Croatian army attacks territory under the Republic of Serbian Krajina in the largest land battle since WWII
1997 – Teamsters began a 15-day strike against UPS (United Parcel Service). The strikers eventually won an increase in full-time positions and defeated a proposed reorganization of the company’s pension plan.
2002 – Soham murders: 10 year old school girls Jessica Chapman and Holly Wells go missing from the town of Soham, Cambridgeshire.
2007 – NASA’s Phoenix spacecraft was launched on a space exploration mission of Mars. The Phoenix lander descended on Mars on May 25, 2008.
2009 – Kim Jong-il meets former president Bill Clinton. He pardons and releases captured American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling who were found guilty of entering the country illegally.
2010 – California’s Proposition 8, the ballot initiative prohibiting same-sex marriage passed by the state’s voters in 2008, is overturned by Judge Vaughn Walker in the case Perry v. Schwarzenegger
2019 – Gunman kills nine and injures 27 at a bar in Dayton, Ohio, in 2nd mass shooting in 24 hours in the US
2019 – China’s central bank allows its currency to weaken under usual 7-1 ratio to the US dollar for first time in a decade in response to further US trade tariffs
2020 – Huge explosions at the port of Beirut, Lebanon, kill more than 200 and leaves over 6,000 thousand people injured
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
