This Week in History: July 20-26, 2020

This Week in History
by Dianne Hermann

“That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history
is the most important of all the lessons of history.” Aldous Huxley

July 20-26, 2020

July 20

1881 – Sioux Indian Chief Sitting Bull, a fugitive since the 1876 Battle of Little Big Horn, surrenders to federal troops and is forced onto a reservation. He was shot and killed in 1890 while being arrested by U.S. government and Indian agents who feared he would lead an uprising.

1917 – The World War I draft lottery held. Number 258 was the first number drawn.

1940 – Billboard publishes the first ranking of record singles. Tommy Dorsey scored the first #1 single with “I’ll Never Smile Again.” The song, featuring vocals by Frank Sinatra, stayed #1 for 12 weeks.

1942 – The first detachment of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAACs) begins basic training at Fort Des Moines, Iowa. There were 440 officer candidates (average age 30) and 125 enlisted women (average age 24).

1969 – Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, Jr. aboard Apollo 11 (The Eagle) become the first men to land on the moon. Michael Collins remained in lunar orbit aboard the command spacecraft. Watch the Eagle land.

1976 – Hank Aaron hits home run #755, his final major league homer, off Angels’ pitcher Dick Drago. Babe Ruth set the home run record at 714 in 1927. Aaron played his last game on October 3rd and was inducted into Baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1982. Hank is 85 years old.

1984 – Vanessa Williams is asked to resign as Miss America after “Penthouse Magazine” announces its plans to publish nude photos of her. Williams, the first black Miss America, resigned three days later, becoming the first Miss America to resign. First runner-up Suzette Charles, Miss New Jersey, assumed the crown. Williams in now 57 years old. Watch the crowning ceremony.

2012 – Twelve people are killed and 70 injured after a gunman opens fire at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. James Eagan Holmes was convicted of murder and given 12 life sentences plus 3,318 years for attempted murder.


July 21

1861 – The Battle of Bull Run at Manassas Junction, Virginia, recognized as the first major battle of the U.S. Civil War, begins. The first land battle of the Civil War was actually the Battle of Carthage (Missouri), fought on July 5th.

1865 – Wild Bill Hickok shoots and kills Davis Tutt in Springfield, Missouri, after quarreling over a card game. This was the first recorded case of two men taking part in a quick-draw duel. The following month Hickok was acquitted of murder after pleading self-defense.

1925 – The Scopes Monkey Trial ends when Tennessee high school biology teacher John Scopes is found guilty of teaching Darwinism. He was fined $100. His defense attorney was Clarence Darrow and the prosecutor was three-time Democrat presidential nominee William Jennings Bryant, who died five days after the trial.

1930 – The U.S. Veterans Administration (VA) is established.

1969 – Neil Armstrong becomes the first man to walk on the moon and utters the immortal words, “One small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.” A total of 12 people have walked on the moon, all Americans. Watch the first small step.

1974 – The House Judiciary Committee approves two Articles of Impeachment against President Richard Nixon following the Watergate investigation. Nixon resigned on August 9th.

1980 – Selective Service (draft) registration begins in the U.S. for men aged 19 and 20 years old following Proclamation #4771 signed by President Carter in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

1984 – The first documented case of a robot killing a human in the U.S. occurs when 34-year-old Harry Allen is pinned by a robot against a trim press at the Diecast Corporation in Jackson, Michigan. Allen died 5 days later.

2004 – White House officials are briefed on the September 11 commission’s final report. The 575-page report concluded that hijackers exploited “deep institutional failings within our government.” The report was released to the public the next day.

2011 – NASA’s Space Shuttle program ends with the landing of Space Shuttle Atlantis on mission STS-135. NASA’s space shuttle program began with its first launch (Columbia mission STS-1) on April 12, 1981. Watch the final landing.

July 22

1587 – The second English colony is established on Roanoke Island off North Carolina. The colony vanished under mysterious circumstances.

1893 – Katharine Lee Bates writes the poem, “America the Beautiful” after being inspired during a visit to Pike’s Peak in Colorado. She didn’t publish it for two years, when it was then set to the music by composer S. A. Ward’s “Materna,” the tune to which we sing it today.

1933 – Wiley Post completes the first solo around-the-world flight. He traveled 15,596 miles in 7 days, 18 hours and 49 minutes.

1934 – “Public Enemy No. 1” John Dillinger is mortally wounded by FBI agents outside Chicago’s Biograph Theatre. Watch a Smithsonian video about his criminal life.

1937 – The U.S. Senate rejects President Roosevelt’s proposal to add up to six more justices to the Supreme Court.

1975 – The House of Representatives votes to restore citizenship to General Robert E. Lee. In 1865, Lee signed an amnesty oath issued by President Andrew Johnson but was not pardoned because Secretary of State William Seward (of Seward’s folly fame) gave the application to a friend as a souvenir. A National Archives examiner eventually found Lee’s oath and initiated the amnesty process.

1994 – OJ Simpson pleads “Absolutely 100 percent not guilty” of murdering his ex-wife and her friend. He was found not guilty on October 3, 1995. One of OJ’s lawyers was Robert “Keeping Up With The” Kardashian. Kardashian died in 2003 at age 59.

1999 – The Woodstock 99 Music Festival (30th anniversary of Woodstock) begins in Rome, New York, and lasted until the 25th. It was attended by an estimated 400,000 and ended early due to violence. Woodstock 50 (50th anniversary) was scheduled for August 16-18, 2019, but it did not take place.


July 23

1715 – The first lighthouse in America is authorized for construction on Little Brewster Island, Massachusetts, and is known as the Boston Light.

1880 – The first application of hydropower electricity generation within an industrial setting in the U.S. occurs when the Wolverine Chair Factory in Grand Rapids, Michigan, powers up 16 brush-arc lamps using a water turbine. The world’s first commercial hydroelectric power plant built to provide electricity to buildings outside the plant opened in September 30, 1882, on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin.

1938 – The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service approves the first federal game preserve. The area covered 2,000 acres in Utah.

1956 – The Bell X-2 rocket plane, piloted by Col. Frank Everest, sets a world aircraft speed record of 1,895 miles per hour (Mach 2.87) at 60,000 feet over Edwards Air Force Base in California. In 1967, the X-15 set the current official world record for the fastest speed ever reached by a manned aircraft at 4,520 mph. Watch a newsreel of the X-2 flight.

1989 – FOX tops ABC, NBC, and CBS in TV ratings for the first time with their show “America’s Most Wanted.” The show was cancelled several times and resumed by public demand. The 6-year-old son of the host John Walsh was kidnapped and murdered in 1981.

2015 – NASA’s Kepler mission announces the discovery of the most Earth-like planet yet, named Kepler-452b, 1,400 light years from Earth (over 8 quadrillion miles).


July 24

1758 – George Washington is admitted to Virginia House of Burgesses. He was 26 years old. Washington represented Frederick County and Fairfax County until 1775. The first meeting of the colonial House of Burgesses was held in Jamestown in 1619.

1824 – A Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, newspaper publishes the results of the first public opinion poll showing a clear lead for presidential candidate Andrew Jackson in a four-candidate race for the presidency. Jackson received a plurality of votes but lost when the House of Representatives settled the contested election by selecting John Quincy Adams, who actually received fewer popular and electoral votes. It was the only election when this ever happened. Four years later, Jackson handily won the White House by defeating incumbent John Quincy Adams.

1915 – The excursion ship Eastland, carrying employees of the Western Electric Company to a company picnic, capsizes on Lake Michigan killing 844 of the 2,573 passengers. Compare that with 815 of the 2,435 passengers that were killed on the Titanic three years earlier. The Eastland almost capsized in July 1904 with 3,000 passengers on board and again in 1906 with 2,530 passengers on board. Watch a 7-minute report with actual footage and photos by the Chicago Tribune on the 100th anniversary of the sinking.

1959 – Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Secretary Nikita Khrushchev have a series of impromptu arguments at the opening of the American National Exhibition in Moscow in what became known as the “Kitchen Debate.” Watch one exchange with translation.

1961 – A U.S. commercial airplane carrying 33 passengers and 5 crew is hijacked to Cuba. It was the first time an American carrier flight originating from the U.S. was hijacked to Cuba. Between 1961 and 1973, almost 160 U.S. aircraft were hijacked.

2002 – James Traficant (D-OH) is expelled from the House of Representatives on a vote of 420 to 1 for using campaign donations for his own personal use. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to eight years in prison. He ran for his former House seat from prison in 2002, and lost. Traficant was released in 2009 and died in 2014 at age 73.

2005 – Lance Armstrong retires after winning a record seventh consecutive Tour de France victory. He was stripped of his titles in 2012 for “doping.” In 2013, he admitted during an Oprah Winfrey interview that he took performance-enhancing drugs. Armstrong is now 48 years old. Watch part of the interview.

July 25

1775 – Maryland issues currency depicting King George III trampling the Magna Carta.

1861 – Congress passes the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution stating that “the present deplorable civil war” . . . “is not waged upon our part in any spirit of oppression” but is to be “fought to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and to preserve the Union.” Sponsored by Representative John Crittenden of Kentucky and Senator (and future president) Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, the purpose was to limit the goals of the war.

1946 – Micheline Bernardini models the first bikini at a Paris fashion show. Mechanical engineer Louis Réard and fashion designer Jacques Heim invented the bikini using 30-square-inches of cloth. Réard named the bombshell swimsuit after the Bikini Atoll where the U.S. tests atomic bombs.

1990 – Roseanne Barr slaughters the National Anthem at San Diego Padre’s baseball game. Billboard ranked Barr’s performance as the second worst public singing of the National Anthem ever. The worst was Kat DeLuna’s performance at a 2008 Dallas Cowboys game. Watch Barr express regret for her performance in an interview.

1997 – Autumn Jackson is found guilty of trying to extort $40 million from Bill Cosby. Jackson served 14 months of a 26-month sentence for extortion, conspiracy, and crossing state lines to commit a crime. She claimed to be Cosby’s child. Jackson is now 45 years old.

2010 – WikiLeaks releases to the public more than 90,000 internal reports involving the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan from 2004-2010. WikiLeaks was founded in 2006 by Julian Assange, who sought refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in June 2012. He left in 2019 and was sentenced to 50 weeks in jail in England for violating terms of his bail. He now faces multiple charges in several countries for espionage and sexual assault. He is currently in Belmarsh Prison in London, having been denied bail. Assange is now 49 years old.


July 26

1775 – Benjamin Franklin becomes the first U.S. Postmaster General.

1878 – The American West outlaw and poet calling himself “Black Bart” (Charles E. Boles) commits his first of 28 robberies when he steals the safe box from a Wells Fargo stagecoach. No one was ever killed in the robberies and some of the empty safe boxes were left with taunting poems inside. He was captured and convicted in 1883 and sentenced to 6 years in jail. He was released from jail early and in 1888 he disappeared.

1908 – U.S. Attorney General Charles Joseph Bonaparte issues an order to staff the Office of the Chief Examiner (later renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation).

1947 – President Harry Truman signs the National Security Act, establishing the Central Intelligence Agency.

1964 – Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa is convicted of fraud and conspiracy and sentenced to prison. The case against Hoffa and organized crime was pursued by Attorney General Robert Kennedy. In 1971, President Nixon commuted Hoffa’s sentence to time served. Hoffa disappeared in 1975 and his body was never found.

1990 – President H. W. Bush signs the Americans with Disabilities Act passed by Congress. The law prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities in all places open to the general public.

1999 – Over 1,500 pieces of Marilyn Monroe’s personal items go on display at Christie’s in New York City. The items went up for auction in October 1999. Watch part of the auction with live commentary.

2005 – The Space Shuttle Discovery (STS-114) launches as NASA’s first scheduled flight mission after the Columbia Disaster in 2003. There were a total of 135 Space Shuttle missions, ending in July of 2011.

Image from: bbc.com

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