July 3
1767: Norway’s oldest newspaper still in print, Adresseavisen, was founded and the first edition published.
1913: Confederate veterans at the Great Reunion of 1913 reenacted Pickett’s Charge of the Battle of Gettysburg, in 1863. Upon reaching the farthest point north that the Confederate Army achieved during the Civil War, they were met by the outstretched hands of friendship from Union Army survivors.
1969: Rolling Stones founder and guitarist Brian Jones drowned at age 27, joining The 27 Club. The largest explosion in the history of rocketry occurred when the Soviet N-1 rocket exploded and subsequently destroyed its launch pad.
1971: Rock singer Jim Morrison of The Doors died of “heart failure” in Paris at age 27, joining The 27 Club.
July 4
1826: Presidents John Adams (1797-1801) and Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809) died this day.
1831: James Monroe, fifth U.S. president, died.
1850: America’s 12th president, Zachary Taylor, contracted food poisoning in the White House. (His condition worsened and he died on July 9.)
1862: Lewis Carroll told 10-year-old Alice Liddell a story near Oxford, England, that would become Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its sequels.
1865: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published.
July 5
1865: William Booth founded the Christian Mission (now the Salvation Army) in London.
1937: Spam, the canned meat, was introduced by the Hormel Foods Corporation.
1946: The bikini went on sale after debuting during an outdoor fashion show in Paris, France.
1996: Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, was created.
July 6
1885: Louis Pasteur announced that he had perfected the rabies vaccine.
1942: Anne Frank and her family went into hiding in the “Secret Annexe” above her father’s office in an Amsterdam warehouse.
1957: John Lennon and Paul McCartney met for the first time, as teenagers at Woolton Fete, three years before forming the Beatles.
July 7
1928: Sliced bread was sold for the first time by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri.
1930: Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser began construction of the Boulder Dam (now known as Hoover Dam).
1947: A supposedly alien spaceship crashed near Roswell, New Mexico.
1954: Elvis Presley made his radio debut when WHBQ Memphis played his first recording for Sun Records, “That’s All Right.”
July 8
1878: The corncob pipe was patented by Henry Tibbe.
1951: Paris celebrated its 2,000th birthday.
1993: Garry Hoy, a Toronto lawyer, fell to his death after he threw himself through a glass wall on the 24th floor of the Toronto-Dominion Centre in order to demonstrate to a group of legal interns that the glass was “unbreakable.”
2013: Jordan Linn Graham, 22, shoved her husband of seven days, Cody Lee Johnson, 25, off a cliff in Glacier National Park, committing the second murder in the park’s history. (The first was in 1983. Graham pleaded guilty to second degree murder.)
July 9
1776: George Washington ordered the Declaration of Independence to be read aloud for the first time, to members of the Continental Army in New York.
1811: Explorer David Thompson posted a sign at the confluence of the Columbia and Snake rivers, in now-Washington state, claiming the land for the United Kingdom.
1850: Twelfth U.S. President Zachary Taylor died of suspected food poisoning, and Millard Fillmore succeeded him as the 13th U.S. president.
1868: The 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, guaranteeing African Americans full citizenship, and all persons in the United States due process of law.
1962: Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans exhibition opened at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles.
1981: Donkey Kong, a video game created by Nintendo, was released. The game marked the debut of Nintendo’s future mascot, Mario.
2011: South Sudan seceded from Sudan and began the world’s newest nation.