TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON – JULY 3
324 Battle of Adrianople: Roman Emperor Constantine I defeats his co-emperor Licinius, who flees to Byzantium
1187 Battle of Horns of Hattin: Saladin, Sultan of Egypt and Syria, destroys Jerusalem’s crusader army
1608 Samuel de Champlain founded the city of Quebec.
1775 George Washington takes command of the Continental Army.
1790 In Paris, the Marquis de Condorcet proposes granting civil rights to women.
1844 Ambassador Caleb Cushing successfully negotiated a commercial treaty with China that opened five Chinese ports to U.S. merchants and protected the rights of American citizens in China.
1863 Confederate forces attack the center of the Union line at Gettysburg, but fail to break it.
1878 John Wise flies the first dirigible in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
1890 Idaho became the 43rd state in the United States.
1898 During the Spanish American War, a fleet of Spanish ships in Cuba’s Santiago Harbor attempted to run a blockade of U.S. naval forces. Nearly all of the Spanish ships were destroyed in the battle that followed.
1901 The Wild Bunch, led by Butch Cassidy, commits its last American robbery near Wagner, Montana, taking $65,000 from a Great Northern train.
1945 The first civilian passenger car built since February 1942 was driven off the assembly line at the Ford Motor Company plant in Detroit, MI. Production had been diverted due to World War II.
1950 U.S. carrier-based planes attack airfields in the Pyongyang-Chinnampo area of North Korea in the first air-strike of the Korean War.
1954 Food rationing ends in Great Britain almost nine years after the end of World War II.
1957 Nikita Khrushchev takes control in the Soviet Union by purging his most serious opponents from positions of authority in government.
1971 The lead singer of “The Doors” Jim Morrison is found dead in a bathtub in his apartment in Paris with heart failure aggravated by excessive drinking.
1974 The Threshold Test Ban Treaty was signed, prohibiting underground nuclear weapons tests with yields greater than 150 kilotons.
1981 The Associated Press ran its first story about two rare illnesses afflicting homosexual men. One of the diseases was later named AIDS.
1986 U.S. President Reagan presided over a ceremony in New York Harbor that saw the relighting of the renovated Statue of Liberty.
1987 The Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie / Butcher of Lyon and the former head of Gestapo who was extradited from Bolivia to face charges is found guilty of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life imprisonment.
1988 Iran Air flight 655 is shot down by a US Navy ship The USS Vincennes mistakenly shot down the airplane en route to Dubai, killing all 290 people aboard. The Vincennes, a guided missile cruiser, incorrectly identified the plane as a military aircraft. In 1996, the United States government made a cash settlement with Iran in order to close the case Iran had brought against the US in the International Court of Justice.
2008 Thomas Beatie has given birth to a baby girl on this day. Beatie, born a female, was legally a male when he became pregnant. Despite going through the gender reassignment process, Beatie chose to keep his female reproductive organs in order to still be able to give birth to children.
2013 Coup in Egypt Egyptian defense minister Abdul Fatah al-Sisi staged a coup and forced out President Mohamed Morsi, just over a year after he was elected.
** history.net, onthisday.com, infoplease.com, timeanddate.com, thepeoplehistory.com, on-this-day.com **
