TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: July 4
1054 Brightest known supernova SN 1054 (creates the Crab Nebula) 1st reported by Chinese astronomers
1453 41 Jewish martyrs burned at stake at Breslau
1774 Orangetown Resolutions adopted in the Province of New York, one of many protests against the British Parliament’s Coercive Acts
1776 The amended Declaration of Independence, prepared by Thomas Jefferson, was approved and signed by John Hancock, the President of the Continental Congress in America.
1779 French fleet occupies Grenada
1803 The Louisiana Purchase was announced in newspapers. The property was purchased, by the U.S. from France, was for $15 million (or 3 cents an acre). The “Corps of Discovery,” led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, began the exploration of the territory on May 14, 1804.
1817 Construction began on the Erie Canal, to connect Lake Erie and the Hudson River.
1826 Past presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams both die on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, President John Quincy Adams calls “visible and palpable remarks of Divine Favor”
1831 Former president James Monroe died.
1836 Wisconsin Territory forms
1838 Iowa Territory is organised from Wisconsin Territory, lasting until 1846
1845 Texas Congress votes for annexation to US
1862 Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) creates Alice in Wonderland for Alice Liddell on a family boat trip on the river Isis (Thames) in Oxford
1881 Booker T. Washington establishes Tuskegee Institute (Alabama)
1884 The Statue of Liberty was presented to the United States in Paris.
1895 Katharine Lee Bates published America the Beautiful.
1901 William Howard Taft, former Federal judge, is installed as first governor-general of the Philippines and declares amnesty for all insurgents who take an oath of allegiance
1910 Race riots broke out all over the United States after African-American Jack Johnson knocked out Jim Jeffries in a heavyweight boxing match.
1917 Troops of the Russian Provisional Government open fire on protesters in Petrograd during the ‘July Days’ of unrest
1934 Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard patents the chain-reaction design for the atomic bomb
1960 The 50-star U.S. flag made its debut in Philadelphia, PA.
1966 LBJ signs Freedom of Information Act
1970 The Falls Road curfew in North Ireland, imposed by the British Army while searching for IRA weapons, continues throughout the day; a man is killed by the British Army
1987 Klaus Barbie, the former Gestapo chief known as the “Butcher of Lyon,” was convicted by a French court of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison.
1997 The Mars Pathfinder, an unmanned spacecraft, landed on Mars. A rover named Sojourner was deployed to gather data about the surface of the planet.
2005 NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft took pictures as a space probe smashed into the Tempel 1 comet. The mission was aimed at learning more about comets that formed from the leftover buidling blocks of the solar system. The Deep Impact mission launched on January 12, 2005.
2009 North Korea launched seven ballistic missiles into waters off its east coast that defied U.N. resolutions.
2012 The European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN, announced the discovery of a new particle with properties consistent with the Higgs boson.
REFERENCE: HISTORY.NET, ONTHISDAY.COM, TIMEANDDATE.COM, INFOPLEASE.COM, FACTMONSTER.COM, SCOPESYS.COM, ON-THIS-DAY.COM, THEPEOPLEHISTORY.COM
