401 The Visigoths, led by King Alaric I, cross the Alps and invade northern Italy
1307 William Tell shoots an apple off his son’s head.
1493 Christopher Columbus first sights the island now known as Puerto Rico.
1787 Louis Daguerre (born), French physicist and photographer, developed the daguerreotype (died 1851)
1810 Asa Gray (born), American botanist, Harvard professor, supporter of Charles Darwin (died 1888)
1814 William Jessop (died), English engineer (born 1745)
1865 Mark Twain’s short story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County is published in the New York Saturday Press.
1883 American and Canadian railroads institute five standard continental time zones, ending the confusion of thousands of local times.
1899 Eugene Ormandy (born), Hungarian-American violinist and conductor (died 1985)
1901 George Gallup (born), American statistician and pollster (died 1984)
1922 Marcel Proust (died), French author (born. 1871)
1961 United States President John F. Kennedy sends 18,000 military advisors to South Vietnam.
1962 Niels Bohr (died), Danish physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (born 1885)
1963 The first push-button telephone goes into service.
1969 Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. (died), American businessman and diplomat (born 1888)
1970 U.S. President Richard Nixon asks the U.S. Congress for $155 million USD in supplemental aid for the Cambodian government.
1978 In Jonestown, Guyana, Jim Jones led his Peoples Temple cult to a mass murder-suicide that claimed 918 lives in all, 909 of them in Jonestown itself, including over 270 children. Congressman Leo J. Ryan is murdered by members of the Peoples Temple hours earlier.
1987 push butU.S. Congress issues its final report on the Iran-Contra Affair.
1987 King’s Cross fire: in London, 31 people die in a fire at the city’s busiest underground station, King’s Cross St Pancras.
1988 U.S. President Ronald Reagan signs a bill into law allowing the death penalty for drug traffickers.
1991 Shiite Muslim kidnappers in Lebanon release Anglican Church envoys Terry Waite and Thomas Sutherland.
1993 In the United States, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is ratified by the House of Representatives.
1999 In College Station, Texas, 12 are killed and 27 injured at Texas A&M University when the 59-foot-tall (18 m) Aggie Bonfire, under construction for the annual football game against the University of Texas, collapses at 2:42am.
2003 The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court rules 4 to 3 in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health that the state’s ban on same-sex marriage is unconstitutional and gives the state legislature 180 days to change the law making Massachusetts the first state in the United States to grant marriage rights to same-sex couples.
EO Smith
Latest posts by EO Smith (see all)
- Patriotism - 4 July, 2017
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- Alternative Facts and Science - 24 January, 2017