1789 New Jersey becomes the first U.S. state to ratify the Bill of Rights.
1820 An 80-ton sperm whale attacks the Essex (a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts) 2,000 miles from the western coast ofSouth America (Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick is in part inspired by this story).
1886 Karl von Frisch (born), Austrian zoologist, Nobel Prize laureate (died 1982)
1908 Alistair Cooke (born), English-American journalist (died 2004)
1910 Leo Tolstoy (died), Russian author (born 1828)
1925 Robert F. Kennedy (born), American politician, 64th United States Attorney General (died 1968)
1939 Dick Smothers (born), American actor and singer (Smothers Brothers)
1945 Trials against 24 Nazi war criminals start at the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg.
1946 Duane Allman (born), American singer-songwriter and guitarist (The Allman Brothers Band, Hour Glass, Derek and the Dominos, and The Allman Joys) (died 1971)
1947 Joe Walsh (born), American singer-songwriter, guitarist, producer, and actor (Eagles, James Gang, and Barnstorm)
1947 Princess Elizabeth marries Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, who becomes the Duke of Edinburgh, at Westminster Abbey in London.
1956 Bo Derek (born), American actress and producer
1962 In response to the Soviet Union agreeing to remove its missiles from Cuba, U.S. President John F. Kennedy ends the quarantine of theCaribbean nation.
1969 Occupation of Alcatraz: Native American activists seize control of Alcatraz Island until being ousted by the U.S. Government on June 11, 1971.
1969 The Cleveland Plain Dealer publishes explicit photographs of dead villagers from the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.
1974 The United States Department of Justice files its final anti-trust suit against AT&T Corporation. This suit later leads to the breakup of AT&T and its Bell System.
1976 Trofim Lysenko (died), Russian biologist (born 1898)
1977 Egyptian President Anwar Sadat becomes the first Arab leader to officially visit Israel, when he met Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and spoke before the Knesset, seeking a permanent peace settlement.
1980 Lake Peigneur drains into an underlying salt deposit. A misplaced Texaco oil probe had been drilled into the Diamond Crystal Salt Mine, causing water to flow down into the mine, eroding the edges of the hole. The resulting whirlpool sucked the drilling platform, several barges, houses and trees thousands of feet down to the bottom of the dissolving salt deposit.
1985 Microsoft Windows 1.0 is released.
1998 A court in Afghanistan declares accused terrorist Osama bin Laden “a man without a sin” in regard to the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
2001 U.S. President George W. Bush dedicates the United States Department of Justice headquarters building as the Robert F. Kennedy Justice Building, honoring the late Robert F. Kennedy on what would have been his 76th birthday.
2008 Critical failures in the US financial system began to build up after mid-September, the Dow Jones Industrial Average reaches its lowest level (6547.05) since 1997.
EO Smith
Latest posts by EO Smith (see all)
- Patriotism - 4 July, 2017
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- Alternative Facts and Science - 24 January, 2017