This day in history.....

July 25th


1261: Michael VIII Palaeologus recovers the city of Constantinople and is crowned Byzantine emperor there, restoring Greek control over the Byzantine Empire after a half century of Latin rule.


1895: Pierre Curie marries fellow chemist Marie Sklodowska. The two researchers will share the Nobel Prize for physics in 1903 for their work on radioactivity.


1929: Pope Pius XI makes the first public appearance by a pope outside the Vatican since 1870.


1978: Louise Joy Brown, the world's first "test-tube" baby, is born in England. She is the product of in vitro fertilization, in which the mother's egg is fertilized outside of her body.


1997: K. R. Narayanan is sworn in as president of India, becoming the first member of India's Dilit or "untouchable" caste to lead the country.


1999: American cyclist Lance Armstrong wins the Tour de France, bicycle racing's top event, less than three years after being diagnosed with testicular cancer.
 
July 26


1847: Liberia, a West African colony formed to resettle freed American slaves, declares its independence, becoming the first independent republic in Africa.


1945: A landslide victory for the opposition Labour Party in British elections near the end of World War II forces wartime prime minister Winston Churchill to resign. He is succeeded by Clement Attlee.


1948: U.S. president Harry Truman signs executive orders that require the racial integration of the American armed forces and ban discrimination in federal employment.


1952: Eva Perón, the popular wife, known as Evita, of Argentine president Juan Perón, dies of cancer at the age of 33.


1953: Rebel leader Fidel Castro leads a failed assault on Cuban army barracks in Santiago de Cuba. The date of the raid gives Castro's 26th of July guerrilla movement its name.


1956: Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser announces the nationalization of the Suez Canal. On July 31 Britain, France, and the United States retaliate with financial sanctions.
 
July 28th


1750: German organist and composer Johann Sebastian Bach dies at the age of 65, after a failed eye operation.


1794: French revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre, who had executed many others during the Reign of Terror, dies at the guillotine himself after revolutionary leaders tire of his extremism.


1868: The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is ratified, giving full citizenship to African Americans and applying civil rights protections to states and the federal government.


1932: Federal troops under General Douglas MacArthur drive the so-called Bonus Army, veterans of World War I who sought the payment of a delayed bonus, out of their encampment in Washington, D.C.

1945: A B-25 bomber, lost in low clouds, crashes into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building, killing 14.


1976: Two earthquakes, one measuring 8.2 on the Richter scale, hit Tangshan, China, killing more than 240,000 people.
 
July 31st, 2008



My son Michael's 14th Birthday!!!


1777: The Continental Congress appoints the Marquis de Lafayette, a French volunteer soldier, a major general in the Continental Army at the age of 19.


1790: The new U.S. Patent Office gives Samuel Hopkins the first U.S. patent, for his process for making potash and pearl ashes.


1874: Patrick Healy, an African American Jesuit priest, is named president of Georgetown University, becoming the first black head of a predominantly white college in the United States.

1919: Germany adopts the Weimar Constitution, which provides the basis for government in the country until Adolf Hitler seizes power in 1933.


1941: German field marshal Hermann Göring sends a directive to Nazi security director Reynhard Heydrich, ordering him to prepare a "final solution to the Jewish question": the extermination of the Jews.


1975: Jimmy Hoffa, the former president of the Teamsters union, is reported missing. Although his body has never been found, he is believed to have been kidnapped and murdered.
 
8-02-08


1622: Nathaniel Butter and William Sheffard publish Newes from Most Parts of Christendom, the first regular newspaper printed in England. Because of political restrictions, it covers mainly foreign news.


1876: Frontier lawman Wild Bill Hickok is shot from behind while playing poker in a Deadwood, South Dakota, saloon. Hickock's final hand, pairs of aces and eights, becomes known as the "dead man's hand." :brow2:


1923: President Warren G. Harding dies in San Francisco, four days after collapsing from an embolysm. Vice President Calvin Coolidge is sworn in to succeed him the next day.


1939: Albert Einstein, representing fellow physicists who have discovered that an atomic bomb could be built from uranium, urges President Franklin D. Roosevelt to promote such research before Germany does.


1943: A Japanese destroyer rams a U.S. Navy PT boat commanded by John F. Kennedy. Kennedy and the other survivors swim for hours to a nearby island and are rescued four days later.


1990: Shortly after midnight, 150,000 Iraqi troops invade neighboring Kuwait, capturing the capital city by dawn. The Iraqis will be driven from Kuwait in February at the end of the Persian Gulf War.
Learn more about the Persian Gulf War.
 
August 3rd


1492: Three ships commanded by Christopher Columbus depart from Palos de la Frontera, Spain, on the voyage that leads to the European discovery of the New World.


1829: William Tell, the final opera of composer Gioacchino Rossini, has its premiere in Paris, France.


1907: John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company is indicted for receiving rebates from railroads as a means of stifling competition.


1936: American sprinter Jesse Owens wins the first of his four gold medals in the Olympic Games in Berlin, Germany, tying the Olympic record of 10.3 sec in the 100-meter dash.


1948: Writer Whittaker Chambers testifies before Congress that Alger Hiss, a former high government official, was a Communist and a Soviet spy. Hiss is later convicted of perjury but maintains his innocence.


1981: Air traffic controllers in the United States go on an illegal strike. When the strike continues, President Ronald Reagan fires a majority of the nation's air traffic controllers later in the year.
 
8-4-08


1735: A jury finds John Peter Zenger, publisher of the New York Weekly Journal, not guilty of seditious libel. The case marks the first victory for American freedom of the press.

1809: Prince Metternich, who will dominate European affairs for much of the next four decades, becomes foreign minister of the Austrian Habsburg empire.


1914: Britain enters World War I by declaring war on Germany after Germany refuses to honor the neutrality of Belgium.


1944: In Amsterdam, Nazi officers arrest 15-year-old diarist Anne Frank and four other Jews in the annex where they have been hiding for two years. Frank will die in the Belsen concentration camp the next year.


1964: Over a month after their disappearance was reported, the bodies of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman, are unearthed in Philadelphia, Mississippi.


1964: U.S. warships in the Gulf of Tonkin report an attack by North Vietnam. The unconfirmed report, along with an earlier encounter, leads Congress to approve U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.
 
8-13-08


1521: A Spanish force under Hernán Cortés, aided by Tlaxcalan allies, completes its capture of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán (the site of present-day Mexico City), after an eight-week siege.


1624: French king Louis XIII makes Cardinal Richelieu his chief minister. Richelieu will firmly rule the country for the next 18 years, bringing it to military prominence in Europe.


1876: German composer Richard Wagner's four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen premieres in the new Bayreuth Festspielhaus, which Wagner had built for performances of the Ring cycle.


1923: Mustafa Kemal, later known as Atatürk ("Father Turk"), is elected the first president of the republic of Turkey.


1942: Bambi, Walt Disney's fifth animated feature, opens at New York's Radio City Music Hall.


1961: The East German government surrounds West Berlin with temporary fortifications during the night, stopping the flight of East Germans to the West. The barrier is soon replaced by the concrete Berlin Wall.
 
8-16-08


1819: In what becomes known as the Peterloo Massacre, 11 people die when government calvary troops attack a large crowd demonstrating for economic and political reform in Manchester, England.


1906: An earthquake measuring at 8.6 on the Richter scale virtually destroys the city of Valparaiso, Chile, killing thousands of people.


1948: Baseball slugger Babe Ruth dies at the age of 53 in New York City.


1960: The island of Cyprus, led by its newly elected president, Archbishop Makarios, declares its independence from Britain.


1977: Singer Elvis Presley, age 42, is found dead at his Graceland mansion in Memphis, Tennessee.


1981: American swimmer Mary T. Meagher sets a world record of 57.93 sec for the 100-meter butterfly, three days after setting the world 200-meter butterfly mark.
 
8-17-08


My son MATTHEW"S 8th Birthday!:swing:


1790: The federal capital of the United States moves from New York City to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where it will remain until it moves again to Washington, D.C., in 1800.


1896: Gold is discovered in Bonanza Creek in the Klondike region of Canada's Yukon Territory. A gold rush in the Klondike and nearby Alaska will begin the following year when news of the strike spreads.


1947: Indonesian nationalist leader Sukarno proclaims the country's independence from the Netherlands and becomes its first president.


1962: Peter Fechter, an 18-year-old East German attempting to escape to the West over the Berlin Wall, is shot and killed by East German guards, setting off mass demonstrations in West Berlin.


1969: Hurricane Camille batters Louisiana and Mississippi, killing over 250 people.


1998: President Bill Clinton gives videotaped testimony to a grand jury investigating his relationship with former intern Monica Lewinsky. Later that day, he acknowledges the relationship in a televised speech.
 
8-23-08


1305: Scottish nationalist William Wallace is executed in London as a traitor against King Edward I of England. He is tried in Westminster Hall, London, and promptly hanged and quartered.


1821: Following a decade-long rebellion against Spanish colonists, Mexico receives its independence in the Treaty of Córdoba.

1902: American cooking authority Fannie Farmer opens her School of Cookery in Boston, Massachusetts. The school is designed to train housewives rather than professional chefs.


1926: Silent film idol Rudolph Valentino dies unexpectedly at the age of 31, sending hundreds of thousands of his fans into public mourning.


1927: Niccola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Italian immigrants and anarchists, are executed for murder in a case that aroused international protests of their innocence.


1939: Foreign ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov of the Soviet Union sign a nonaggression pact between the two countries, opening the door to their partition of Poland.
 
8-24-08


1572: King Charles IX of France, under the influence of his mother, Catherine de Médicis, orders the mass killing of Huguenots, as the Protestants in France were known, in the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre.


1814: In the last months of the War of 1812, British forces invade Washington, D.C., where they set fire to the Capitol and the White House.


1940: Australian-born British pathologist Howard Florey and German-born British biochemist Ernst Chain announce in The Lancet that they have developed penicillin for general clinical use as an antibiotic.


1989: Baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti suspends Cincinnati Reds manager and former star player Pete Rose for life for gambling on baseball.


1992: Hurricane Andrew devastates southern Florida, causing $20 billion of property damage and killing 41 people.


79: Italian volcano Mount Vesuvius erupts, burying the cities of Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stabaie in ashes and mud.
 
8-26-08


1839: U.S. Coast Guard officers board L'Amistad, a ship anchored off Long Island. They find the African slaves on the ship have revolted against their captors and taken control of the vessel.

1847: Liberia, the colony established in west Africa for freed U.S. slaves, is proclaimed an independent republic under the presidency of Joseph Roberts.


1883: The small volcanic island of Krakatoa in Indonesia begins to erupt. The eruptions, which nearly destroy the island, cause tidal waves that kill thousands of people on the larger islands of Java and Sumatra.


1896: Armenians in Constantinople revolt against the Ottoman Empire, leading to a three-day massacre of more than 6,000 Armenians.


1920: Eight days after Tennessee became the final state to ratify the 19th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, the amendment is formally adopted, giving American women the right to vote.


1977: The province of Québec, under the leadership of premier René Lévesque, passes a law extending the requirements for the use of French as the province's official language.
 
8-27-08


1660: After the restoration of King Charles II of England, the books of poet and pamphleteer John Milton are burned in London for his attacks on the king during the English Revolution.


1859: In Titusville, Pennsylvania, Edwin Drake drills the first successful oil well in the United States.

1963: Having renounced his U.S. citizenship earlier that year, African American scholar and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois dies in Ghana at the age of 95.


1976: Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announce that they have assembled a synthetic gene and implanted it into a living cell of the bacterium E. coli.


1982: Oakland A's outfielder Rickey Henderson steals his 119th base of the season, breaking Lou Brock's single-season record for major league baseball.
 
8-28-08


1850: Composer and pianist Franz Liszt conducts the premiere of Richard Wagner's opera Lohengrin in Weimar, Germany.


1955: Fourteen-year-old African American Emmett Till is abducted and later murdered by two white men in Mississippi, after he allegedly flirts with a white woman.


1963: More than 200,000 people participate in the March on Washington, demanding full civil rights for black Americans. The day culminates in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s legendary "I Have a Dream" speech.


1968: Police in Chicago, Illinois, violently attack protesters against the Vietnam War who have filled the streets outside the Democratic National Convention.

430: Saint Augustine, one of the most influential theologians in the history of the Catholic church, dies at Hippo at the age of 75.
 
8-29-08


1831: English chemist Michael Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction, the production of an electric current by change in magnetic intensity, which is the principle of the electric generator.


1842: Under the Treaty of Nanking, which ends the First Opium War, China cedes Hong Kong to Britain and opens five of its ports to British trade.


1897: The first Zionist Congress, called by journalist Theodor Herzl to organize a movement for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, meets in Basel, Switzerland.


1952: 4'33", a piece by avant-garde composer John Cage in which the performer's silence elevates the incidental noise of the concert hall to the status of music, has its debut in Woodstock, New York.


1957: South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond ends a record filibuster in the Senate, holding the floor for over 24 hours to delay a vote on a civil rights bill that eventually passes the Senate.


1966: The Beatles play their final live concert, at Candlestick Park in San Francisco, California. The band continues to record together until their breakup in 1970.
 
8-30-08


1800: A planned slave revolt near Richmond, Virginia, led by former slave Gabriel Prosser, is foiled by a thunderstorm and betrayed by participants. Prosser and his main conspirators are captured and hanged.


1928: Indian nationalist Jawarhalal Nehru organizes the Independence of India League to challenge British rule in India.


1983: Aboard the U.S. space shuttle Challenger, astronaut Guion Bluford becomes the first African American to go into space.


1991: Long overshadowed by his rival Carl Lewis, American Mike Powell breaks Bob Beamon's 1968 world record in the long jump, leaping 8.95 m (29.36 ft) at the track and field World Championships in Tokyo, Japan.

1993: After leaving NBC for CBS, comedian David Letterman debuts his new late-night talk show, the Late Show with David Letterman.


30 BC: Under the threat of being taken prisoner by Roman emperor Octavian, Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt, poisons herself. According to legend, she dies by allowing an asp to bite her.
 
8-31-08


1867: Stricken by paralysis, poet Charles Baudelaire dies in Paris, France, at the age of 46.


1897: American inventor Thomas Edison receives a U.S. patent for his motion-picture camera, known as the Kinetoscope, amid rival claims by inventors of similar machines.


1928: Die Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera), a musical collaboration between dramatist Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill, starring Lotte Lenya, premieres in Berlin, Germany.


1962: Trinidad and Tobago (previously members of the West Indies Federation) join as an independent nation within the British Commonwealth.


1980: The Polish government comes to an agreement with striking workers at the Gdansk shipyard, leading to the recognition of Solidarity as Communist Poland's first legal trade union.


1997: Princess Diana of England dies along with her companion, department store heir Dodi Fayed, when their car crashes in Paris while evading photographers. :crying5:
 
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