1947 – Roswell UFO sighting – An object crashed into a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico raising speculations that the object was an extraterrestrial spacecraft containing alien life forms.
1124 – Tyrus surrenders to Crusaders
1438 – King Charles VII issues the Pragmatic Sanction of Bourges stating that a General Church Council with superior power to the Pope must be held every 10 years
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
1550 – Traditional date Chocolate thought to have been introduced to Europe
1754 – Kings College opened in New York City. It was renamed Columbia College 30 years later.
1797 – William Blount of Tennessee became the first U.S. senator to be impeached.
1798 – Quasi-War: the U.S. Congress rescinds treaties with France sparking the ‘war’
1802 – 1st comic book “The Wasp” is published in Hudson, New York criticizing Republican politicians
1846 – U.S. annexation of California was proclaimed at Monterey after the surrender of a Mexican garrison.
1863 – 1st military draft by US (exemptions cost $100)
1863 – Orders barring Jews from serving under US General Ulysses S. Grant are revoked
1865 – Mary Surratt, Lewis Powell, David Herold and George Atzerodt are executed for their role in the conspiracy to assassinate US President Abraham Lincoln
1876 – Hamburg massacre: white farmers attack a black militia in Hamburg, South Carolina with 7 killed
1891 – Marcellus F. Berry, an American Express employee is granted four copyrights for what he called “the travelers cheque”
1917 – Aleksandr Kerensky formed a provisional government in Russia.
1928 – Sliced bread sold for the first time by the Chillicothe Baking Company, Missouri, using a machine invented by Otto Frederick Rohwedder. Described as the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped.
1930 – Construction began on Boulder Dam, later Hoover Dam, on the Colorado River.
1937 – Japanese and Chinese troops clash at the Marco Polo Bridge, beginning the Second Sino-Japanese War
1946 – Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini was canonized as the first American saint.
1947 – Roswell UFO sighting – An object crashed into a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico raising speculations that the object was an extraterrestrial spacecraft containing alien life forms.
1958 – President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs the Alaska Statehood Act into law
1960 – USSR shoots down a US aircraft over Barents sea
1966 – Obscenity ban for “Naked Lunch” by William S. Burroughs overturned by the Massachusetts Supreme Court after testimony by Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer
1969 – Canada’s House of Commons gave final approval to a measure that made the French language equal to English throughout the national government.
1976 – 119 women joined the Corps of Cadets, establishing the first class of women in the US Military Academy at West Point
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 strikes down Gramm-Rudman deficit-reduction law
1986 – Soviet General and spy for the US Dmitri Polyakov arrested in retirement in Russia (executed 1988)
1987 – Public testimony at the Iran-Contra hearing began.
1999 – In Sierra Leone, President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah and rebel leader Foday Sankoh signed a pact to end the nation’s civil war.
2002 – A scandal breaks out in the United Kingdom when news reports accuse MI6 of sheltering Abu Qatada, supposed European Al Qaeda leader
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 – 52 people were killed and hundreds injured in London when terrorists bombed subways and a bus
2014 – Israel launches a “counter-terrorist operation” dubbed Operation Protective Edge against Hamas in Gaza
2016 – In Dallas Texas, lone gunman shots and kills five police officers, wounding others during a protest march against fatal police shootings of African Americans
2019 – Mississippi closes all its beaches due to toxic algae bloom due to flooding of the Mississippi River
2021 – Haiti president Jovenel Moïse assassinated in his home in Pétionville, Haiti, state of emergency declared across the country
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
