TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: JULY 2
626 Incident at Xuanwu Gate: in fear of assassination, Li Shimin ambushes and kills his rival brothers Li Yuanji and Li Jiancheng
1644 Oliver Cromwell crushes the Royalists at the Battle of Marston Moor.
1776 Richard Henry Lee’s resolution that the American colonies “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States” was adopted by the Continental Congress.
1822 Denmark Vesey is executed in Charleston, South Carolina, for planning a massive slave revolt.
1843 Alligator Falls Out of the Sky in Charleston, South Carolina during a thunderstorm.
1858 Czar Alexander II frees the serfs working on imperial lands.
1881 Charles J. Guiteau fatally wounds President James A. Garfield in Washington, D.C.
1890 Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act.
1937 American aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart disappears in the Central Pacific during an attempt to fly around the world.
1947 An object crashed near Roswell, NM. The U.S. Army Air Force insisted it was a weather balloon, but eyewitness accounts led to speculation that it might have been an alien spacecraft.
1955 “Lawrence Welk Show” premiers on ABC
1956 Elvis Presley records “Hound Dog” & “Don’t Be Cruel”
1964 U.S. President Johnson signed the “Civil Rights Act of 1964” into law. The act made it illegal in the U.S. to discriminate against others because of their race.
1976 North and South Vietnam are officially reunified.
1990 1,426 pilgrims trampled to death after a panic in a tunnel in Mecca, Saudi Arabia
1998 Cable News Network (CNN) retracted a story that alleged that U.S. commandos had used nerve gas to kill American defectors during the Vietnam War.
2001 World’s First Self-Contained Artificial Heart Transplant. 59-year old American Robert L. Tools became the first person to receive the a self-contained artificial heart transplant called the AbioCor at the Jewish Hospital in Louisville, Kentucky.
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
