TODAY’S HISTORY LESSON: July 7
1456 Twenty-five years after her execution, Pope Calixtus III annulled the heresy charges brought against Joan of Arc.
1520 Battle of Otumba, Mexico: Hernán Cortés and the Tlaxcalans defeat a numerically superior Aztec force
1754 Kings College opened in New York City. It was renamed Columbia College 30 years later.
1777 American troops give up Fort Ticonderoga, on Lake Champlain, to the British.
1791 Benjamin Rush, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones found the Non-denominational African Church.
1797 William Blount of Tennessee became the first U.S. senator to be impeached.
1798 Napoleon Bonaparte’s army begins its march towards Cairo from Alexandria.
1814 Sir Walter Scott’s novel Waverley is published anonymously so as not to damage his reputation as a poet.
1846 Commodore John D. Sloat occupied Monterey and declared California annexed to the United States.
1853 Japan opens its ports to trade with the West after 250 years of isolation.
1863 1st military draft by US (exemptions cost $100)
1865 4 Lincoln assassination conspirators, including Mary Surratt, hanged
1885 G. Moore Peters patented the cartridge-loading machine.
1891 Travelers cheque patented
1927 Christopher Stone becomes the first British ‘disc jockey’ when he plays records for the BBC.
1937 Japanese and Chinese troops clash at the Marco Polo Bridge, beginning the Second Sino-Japanese War
1941 Although a neutral country, the United States sends troops to occupy Iceland to keep it out of Germany’s hands.
1946 Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini canonized as 1st American saint
1958 President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs the Alaska Statehood Act into law
1975 TV soap opera “Ryan’s Hope” premieres
1981 U.S. President Reagan announced he was nominating Arizona Judge Sandra Day O’Connor to become the first female justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
1983 Eleven-year-old Samantha Smith of Manchester, Maine, left for a visit to the Soviet Union at the personal invitation of Soviet leader Yuri V. Andropov.
1986 Supreme Court struck down Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction law
1994 Amazon.com, Inc. was founded in Seattle, Washington under the name “Cadabra.”
2003 In Liberia, a team of U.S. military experts arrived at the U.S. embassy compound to assess whether to deploy troops as part of a peacekeeping force in the country.
2005 Coordinated terrorist bomb blasts strike London’s public transport system during the morning rush hour killing 52 and injuring 700
REFERENCE: HISTORY.NET, ONTHISDAY.COM, TIMEANDDATE.COM, INFOPLEASE.COM, FACTMONSTER.COM, SCOPESYS.COM, ON-THIS-DAY.COM, THEPEOPLEHISTORY.COM
