1735 John Adams (born), American politician, 2nd President of the United States (died 1826)
1748 Martha Jefferson (born), American wife of Thomas Jefferson (died 1782)
1831 In Southampton County, Virginia, escaped slave Nat Turner is captured and arrested for leading the bloodiest slave rebellion in United States history.
1857 Georges Gilles de la Tourette (born), French neurologist (died 1904)
1864 Helena, Montana is founded after four prospectors discover gold at “Last Chance Gulch”.
1893 Charles Atlas (born), Italian bodybuilder (died 1972)
1907 Sol Tax (born), American anthropologist (died 1995)
1922 Benito Mussolini is made Prime Minister of Italy.
1938 Orson Welles broadcasts his radio play of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, causing anxiety in some of the audience in the United States.
1939 Grace Slick (born), American singer-songwriter and model (Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship, and The Great Society)
1941 World War II: Franklin Delano Roosevelt approves U.S. $1 billion in Lend-Lease aid to the Allied nations.
1942 Lt. Tony Fasson, Able Seaman Colin Grazier and canteen assistant Tommy Brown from HMS Petard board U-559, retrieving material which would lead to the decryption of the German Enigma code.
1944 Anne Frank and sister Margot Frank are deported from Auschwitz to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
1945 Jackie Robinson of the Kansas City Monarchs signs a contract for the Brooklyn Dodgers to break the baseball color barrier.
1953 Cold War: U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower formally approves the top secret document National Security Council Paper No. 162/2, which states that the United States’ arsenal of nuclear weapons must be maintained and expanded to counter the communist threat.
1961 Because of “violations of Lenin’s precepts”, it is decreed that Joseph Stalin’s body be removed from its place of honour inside Lenin’s tomb and buried near the Kremlinwall with a plain granite marker instead.
1961 Nuclear testing: The Soviet Union detonates the hydrogen bomb Tsar Bomba over Novaya Zemlya archipelago at Sukhoy.; at 50-58 megatons of yield, it is still the largest explosive device ever detonated, nuclear or otherwise.
1974 The Rumble in the Jungle boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman takes place in Kinshasa, Zaire.
1974 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre makes its Hollywood (Los Angeles) debut.
1985 Space Shuttle Challenger lifts off for mission STS-61-A, its final successful mission.
1987 In Japan, NEC releases the first 16-bit (fourth generation) video game console, the PC Engine, which is later sold in other markets under the name TurboGrafx-16.
2006 Clifford Geertz (died), American anthropologist (born 1926)
2009 Claude Lévi-Strauss (died), French anthropologist and ethnologist (born 1908)
EO Smith
Latest posts by EO Smith (see all)
- Patriotism - 4 July, 2017
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- Alternative Facts and Science - 24 January, 2017