0505: Death of St. Eugenius of Carthage
1105: Death of Rashi, medieval Jewish Bible scholar. His name is a
Hebrew acrostic for Rabbi Shelomoh ben Isaac. Rashi was the leading rabbinic commentator
in his day on the Old Testament and Talmud.
1234: St. Dominic, founder of the Dominicans, was canonized.
1249: Coronation of Alexander III, King of Scotland
1380: Death of Bertrand Du Guesclin, Constable of France
1530: Death of Quentin Massys
1534: Ottoman armies take Tabriz, Persia
1568: Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral perfects a way to bottle beer
1573: Haarlem surrenders to the Spanish army; a massacre follows
1585: Sir Richard Grenville's expedition reaches Roanoke Island
1610: Death of St. Francis Solano
1621: Death of the Archduke Albert of the Catholic Netherlands
1658: Massachusetts Bay Colony annexes Casco Bay, now in Maine
1643: In the English Civil War, the Cavaliers take an early victory
over Oliver Cromell's Roundheads at Roundway Down.
1787: Congress enacted an ordinance governing the Northwest Territory.
1793: French revolutionary writer Jean Paul Marat was stabbed to death
in his bath by Charlotte Corday, who was executed four days later. (Marat's slaying is
depicted in the famous painting by Jacques Louis David.)
1859: Mexican revolutionary President Benito Juarez ordered property of
the Roman Catholic Church confiscated throughout Mexico.
1863: Rioting against the Civil War military draft erupted in New York
City; the violence resulted in the deaths of about one-thousand people over three days.
1865: Horace Greeley advises his readers to "Go west".
1878: The Treaty of Berlin amended the terms of the Treaty of San
Stefano, which had ended the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78.
1883: General Tom Thumb dies. The circus midget was age 45.
1930: The first World Cup Soccer contest is held in Montevideo,
Uruguay.
1935: Strauss was fired from his post as general director of the Nazi
Recishmusikhammer because the Nazis got hold of a letter he wrote, deriding the idea that
he, Mozart, or any other Germanic composer was thinking of his Germanness while composing.
1943: The Nazis actually executed a Munich musicologist because they
caught him distributing literature criticizing Hitler.
1947: Europe accepts the Marshall plan to aid European recovery
following WW2.
1951: Austrian born composer, Arnold Schoenberg dies. He is best known
for his atonal works.
1960: Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy won the Democratic
presidential nomination at his party's convention in Los Angeles.
1967: Race-related rioting broke out in Newark, New Jersey; by the time
the violence ended July 17th, 27 people had been killed.
1977: A 25-hour blackout hit the New York City area after lightning
struck upstate power lines.
1978: Lee Iacocca was fired as president of Ford Motor Company by
chairman Henry Ford the Second.
1979: A 45-hour siege began at the Egyptian Embassy in Ankara, Turkey,
as four Palestinian guerrillas killed two security men and seized 20 hostages.
1983: The Senate approved, 50-49, the production of nerve gas weaponry,
with Vice President George Bush casting the tie-breaking vote.
1984: Walter F. Mondale, the Democratic presidential nominee-apparent,
launched his fall campaign in his boyhood hometown of Elmore, Minnesota, with his newly
chosen running mate, Geraldine A. Ferraro.
1985: Arthur Ashe was the first black to be inducted into the
International Tennis Hall of Fame.
1985: More than 50 rock stars performed a total of 17 hours at
televised "Live Aid" concerts in Philadelphia and London to raise money for
African famine relief.
1986: Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze flew to London for
two days of talks with British officials, the first such visit by a Soviet foreign
minister in more than a decade.
1987: Jury selection began in Washington for the perjury trial of
President Reagan's former aide and longtime confidant, Michael K. Deaver. (Deaver was
later convicted of lying under oath about his lobbying business; he was fined $100,000 and
ordered to perform community service.)
1988: Final results of Mexico's recent presidential election were
released, giving the victory to the candidate of the governing party, Carlos Salinas de
Gortari. Opponents charged that the election had been stolen.
1989: Washington DC attorney Thomas L. Root was rescued after ditching
his private plane into the Atlantic Ocean near the Bahamas; he had suffered a mysterious
gunshot wound. Cuba executed four military officers for conspiring to smuggle drugs to the
United States.
1990: The Senate gave final legislative approval to a bill that would
forbid discrimination based on disability, including that caused by AIDS or alcoholism.
1990: President of the Russian republic Boris Yeltsin resigns from the
Communist Party.
1991: Soviet and American negotiators meeting in Washington wrangled
over a treaty to reduce long-range nuclear missiles.
1992: Democrats opened their 41st national convention at New York's
Madison Square Garden with speakers who taunted George Bush as a failed president ripe for
defeat in November.
1993: The American League defeated the National League in the All-Star
Game, 9-to-3, in Baltimore.
1993: Race car driver Davey Allison died in Birmingham, Alabama, of
injuries suffered in a helicopter crash.
1993: It was an all-Samuel Barber program at Tanglewood . Members of
the Boston Symphony Chamber players joined with baritone Thomas Hampson and pianist John
Browning to presented "Dover Beach," selected songs, and Barber's sole piano
sonata.
1994: President Clinton visited flood-stricken Georgia, where he
announced more than $60 million dollars in aid for Georgia, Alabama and Florida.
1994: Tonya Harding's ex-husband, Jeff Gillooly, was sentenced in
Portland, Oregon, to two years in prison for his role in the attack on Nancy Kerrigan (he
ended up serving six months).
1995: President Clinton denounced a base-closing list for the damage it
would do to California and Texas, but then approved the package while promising to save
jobs in those states.
1995: Just six days after the space shuttle Atlantis returned, the
shuttle Discovery blasted off on a nine-day mission.
1995: About 2,500 workers at Detroit's daily newspapers, the
"Detroit Free Press" and "The Detroit News," went on strike.
1996: At least half a million "ravers" danced around Berlin
to the pulsating beats of techno music for the "Love Parade" festival, making
the event one of the largest public gatherings in the city's post-war history.
1996: After battering the Carolina Coast, the weakened remnants of
Hurricane "Bertha" moved north, spawning tornadoes and dumping rain from
Maryland to Massachusetts.
1997: Secretary of State Madeleine Albright returned to her Jewish
roots in the Czech Republic, finding the names of family members killed by the Nazis
inscribed on a Prague synagogue wall. (News reports the previous February revealed that
Albright, who'd been raised a Roman Catholic, had Jewish relatives, many of whom died in
the Holocaust.)
1998: A jury in Poughkeepsie, New York, ruled that the Reverend Al
Sharpton and two others had defamed a former prosecutor by accusing him of raping Tawana
Brawley.
1998: Four young cousins in Gallup, New Mexico, died after becoming
trapped in a car trunk.
1999: Angel Maturino Resendiz, suspected of being the "railroad
killer," surrendered in El Paso, Texas. In Tehran, police fired tear gas to disperse
10,000 demonstrators on the sixth day of protests against Iranian hard-liners.
1999: The American League won the All-Star game for the third straight
time, defeating the National League 4-1 at Boston's Fenway Park.
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2000: Fellow Democrat Bill Bradley endorsed Vice President Al Gore for president, four months after conceding their fight for the White House.
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2000: Fiji's coup leaders released their remaining 18 captives, ending a two-month-old parliamentary hostage crisis.
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