HISTORY ⭕️ July

[JoGee]

(July 16)

1945 ~
United States conducts first test of the atomic bomb
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The United States conducts the first test of the atomic bomb at at the Trinity bomb site in central New Mexico. The terrifying new weapon would quickly become a focal point in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The official U.S. development of the atomic bomb began with the establishment of the Manhattan Project in August 1942. The project brought together scientists from the United States, Great Britain, and Canada to study the feasibility of building an atomic bomb capable of unimaginable destructive power. The project proceeded with no small degree of urgency, since the American government had been warned that Nazi Germany had also embarked on a program to develop an atomic weapon. By July 1945, a prototype weapon was ready for testing. Although Germany had surrendered months earlier, the war against Japan was still raging. On July 16, the first atomic bomb was detonated in the desert near the Los Alamos research facility. Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the project, watched the mushroom cloud rise into the New Mexico sky. “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds,” he uttered, reciting a passage from an ancient Hindu text. News of the successful test was relayed to President Harry S. Truman, who was meeting with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin in Potsdam to discuss the postwar world. Observers at the meeting noted that the news “tremendously pepped up” the president, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill believed that Truman almost immediately adopted a more aggressive tone in dealing with Stalin.

Truman and many other U.S. officials hoped that possession of the atomic bomb would be America’s trump card in dealing with the Soviets after the war. Use of the weapon against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 demonstrated the destructive force of the atomic bomb. The American atomic monopoly did not last long, though. By 1949, the Soviets had developed their own atomic bomb, marking the beginning of the nuclear arms race.

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[JoGee]

(July 17)

1956. ~
High Society, Grace Kelly’s last film, opens

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On this day in 1956, the movie-musical High Society, starring Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly and Frank Sinatra, opens in theaters around the United States. The film’s tag line–”They’re all together for the first time”–referenced High Society’s all-star cast. High Society marked the last feature film Grace Kelly made before marrying Prince Rainier of Monaco and retiring from acting. High Society, which also featured the musician Louis Armstrong playing himself, was nominated for two Oscars, including Best Song, for Cole Porter’s “True Love.”

High Society was a musical remake of 1940’s Philadelphia Story, which starred Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart. In High Society, Crosby played C.K. Dexter-Haven, a rich man trying to win back his spoiled ex-wife Tracy Lord (Kelly), who is attracted to Mike Connor (Sinatra) but engaged to marry another man.

Grace Kelly, born in 1929, became a movie star in the 1950s with such films as Dial M for Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), The Country Girl (1954), for which she won a Best Actress Academy Award, and To Catch a Thief (1955). On April 19, 1956, Kelly married Prince Rainier, whom she met in 1955 at the Cannes Film Festival, and never acted in movies again. In 1982, Princess Grace died at age 52 in a car accident.

Sinatra, born in 1915, rose to fame as a singer in the 1940s. He won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for From Here to Eternity (1953) and was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for The Man with the Golden Arm (1955). Along with High Society, Sinatra starred in movie musicals Guys and Dolls (1955) and Pal Joey (1957) and played Danny Ocean in Ocean’s Eleven (1960), a role that went to George Clooney in the 2001 remake of the same name. Sinatra died in 1998 at age 82.

Crosby, born in 1903, began his music career in the 1920s. As an actor, he starred in the hugely successful White Christmas (1954), won a Best Actor Oscar for Going My Way(1944), was nominated for Oscars for his performances in The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945) and The Country Girl, and co-starred in seven popular “Road” movies with Bob Hope between 1940 and 1962. Crosby died at age 74 in 1977.

[JoGee]

(July 18)

64
Fire of Rome

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A fire erupts in Rome, spreading rapidly throughout the market area in the center of the city. When the flames finally died out more than a week later, nearly two-thirds of Rome had been destroyed.

Emperor Nero used the fire as an opportunity to rebuild Rome in a more orderly Greek style and began construction on a massive palace called the Domus Aureus. Some speculated that the emperor had ordered the burning of Rome to indulge his architectural tastes, but he was away in Antium when the conflagration began. According to later Roman historians, Nero blamed members of the mysterious Christian cult for the fire and launched the first Roman persecution of Christians in response.

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[JoGee]

(July 19)

1799. -
Rosetta Stone found

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On this day in 1799, during Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign, a French soldier discovers a black basalt slab inscribed with ancient writing near the town of Rosetta, about 35 miles north of Alexandria. The irregularly shaped stone contained fragments of passages written in three different scripts: Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Egyptian demotic. The ancient Greek on the Rosetta Stone told archaeologists that it was inscribed by priests honoring the king of Egypt, Ptolemy V, in the second century B.C. More startlingly, the Greek passage announced that the three scripts were all of identical meaning. The artifact thus held the key to solving the riddle of hieroglyphics, a written language that had been “dead” for nearly 2,000 years.

When Napoleon, an emperor known for his enlightened view of education, art and culture, invaded Egypt in 1798, he took along a group of scholars and told them to seize all important cultural artifacts for France. Pierre Bouchard, one of Napoleon’s soldiers, was aware of this order when he found the basalt stone, which was almost four feet long and two-and-a-half feet wide, at a fort near Rosetta. When the British defeated Napoleon in 1801, they took possession of the Rosetta Stone.

Several scholars, including Englishman Thomas Young made progress with the initial hieroglyphics analysis of the Rosetta Stone. French Egyptologist Jean-Francois Champollion (1790-1832), who had taught himself ancient languages, ultimately cracked the code and deciphered the hieroglyphics using his knowledge of Greek as a guide. Hieroglyphics used pictures to represent objects, sounds and groups of sounds. Once the Rosetta Stone inscriptions were translated, the language and culture of ancient Egypt was suddenly open to scientists as never before.


The Rosetta Stone has been housed at the British Museum in London since 1802, except for a brief period during World War I. At that time, museum officials moved it to a separate underground location, along with other irreplaceable items from the museum’s collection, to protect it from the threat of bombs.

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[JoGee]

(July 20)

1976
Viking 1 lands on Mars
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On the seventh anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing, the Viking 1 lander, an unmanned U.S. planetary probe, becomes the first spacecraft to successfully land on the surface of Mars.

Viking 1 was launched on August 20, 1975, and arrived at Mars on June 19, 1976. The first month of its orbit was devoted to imaging the surface to find appropriate landing sites. On July 20, 1976, the Viking 1 lander separated from the orbiter, touched down on the Chryse Planitia region of Mars, and sent back the first close-up photographs of the rust-colored Martian surface.

In September 1976, Viking 2–launched only three weeks after Viking 1–entered into orbit around Mars, where it assisted Viking 1 in imaging the surface and also sent down a lander. During the dual Viking missions, the two orbiters imaged the entire surface of Mars at a resolution of 150 to 300 meters, and the two landers sent back more than 1,400 images of the planet’s surface.

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[JoGee]

(July 21)

1973
“Soul Makossa” is the first disco record to make the Top 40

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During the pre-dawn hours of nearly any given night in the early 1970s, a group of young men who would change the face of the music industry could be found eating omelets and talking about records at a Manhattan restaurant called David’s Pot Belly. The names in this rotating group of friends are unfamiliar to most: David Mancuso, David Rodriguez, Michael Cappello and Nicky Siano. They were not musicans but DJs at dance clubs like The Gallery, The Loft and Le Jardin, and through their taste in music and their obsessive search for new material, they would collectively bring a thing called “Disco” into existence. Their power to shape popular culture would first become evident on this day in 1973, when a song called “Soul Makossa” entered the Billboard Top 40 as the first-ever chart hit definitively launched by the infant disco scene.

“Soul Makossa” was a 1972 recording by the Paris-based Cameroonian artist Emmanual “Manu” Dibango, and it is now best remembered as the source of the rhythmic chant—”Mama-ko, mama-sa, maka-mako-sa“—that appears in Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin”” (1982) and Rihanna’s “Don’t Stop The Music” (2006). Issued on the French label Fiesta, “Soul Makossa” might never have been heard on this side of the Atlantic had David Mancuso not pulled it from a shelf in a Jamaican record shop in Brooklyn one day in the spring of 1973 and, after hearing it, immediately recognized its percussion-heavy, Afro-Latin sound and repetitive chorus as absolutely perfect for the dance floor.

While DJs like Mancuso scoured every corner of New York City for new dance records to spin, the record industry paid absolutely no attention to the club scene, never having considered that it might offer a way to “break” a new record. “Soul Makossa” would change all that. As soon as Mancuso began spinning it at The Loft, his fellow DJs had to have their own copies, and so did their fans. Rolling Stone and Billboard magazine noted that the street price of the rare import had shot through the roof in New York City as devotees of the largely black, gay and Hispanic club scene tried to get their hands on Manu Dibango’s surprise hit. “People went wild trying to find that record,” Nicky Siano recalled in Love Saves The Day (2003), Tim Lawrence’s history of American dance culture in the 1970s. “No one had ‘Soul Makossa.'”

Taking note of its underground success, Atlantic Records licensed “Soul Makossa” from Dibango’s French label and released a domestic version of the single. When it entered the Top 40 on this day in 1973, it awakened the music industry to an important new cultural and commercial phenomenon, laying the groundwork for the disco explosion to come.



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[Paula A]

Today, July 20, 1969 (?), U.S. Landed on the moon. I was working that summer in San Diego after the winter semester of college. A sub for aides on vacation at Scripps Memorial Hospital. It was during lunch time in our time zone and I was in the cafeteria eating. Everyone just stood up and stared at the tv as the module landed and when those words, "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" we're said the whole room, doctors, nurses, cooks, janitors ALL erupted in cheers! It was the most American experience I had ever had!

[JoGee]

(July 22)

1916
Preparedness Day bombing in San Francisco

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On this day in 1916, a massive parade held in San Francisco, California, to celebrate Preparedness Day, in anticipation of the United States entrance into World War I, is disrupted by the explosion of a suitcase bomb, which kills 10 bystanders and wounds 40 more.

By the summer of 1916, with the Great War raging in Europe and with U.S. and other neutral ships threatened by German submarine aggression, it had become clear to many in the U.S. that their country could not stand on the sidelines much longer. With this in mind, leading business figures in the city of San Francisco planned a parade in honor of American military preparedness. As the event neared, it was clear that anti-war and isolationist sentiments ran high among a significant population of the city (and the country), not only among such radical organizations as International Workers of the World (the so-called “wobblies”) but among mainstream labor leaders. These opponents of the Preparedness Day event undoubtedly shared the view voiced publicly by one critic, former U.S. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan, who claimed that the organizers, San Francisco’s financiers and factory owners, were acting in pure self-interest, as they clearly stood to benefit from an increased production of munitions.

The Preparedness Day parade went ahead on Saturday, July 22, with a 3.5-hour-long procession of some 51,329 marchers, including 52 bands and 2,134 organizations, comprising military, civic, judicial, state and municipal divisions as well as newspaper, telephone, telegraph and streetcar unions. At 2:06 p.m., about a half-hour after the parade began, a bomb concealed in a suitcase exploded on the west side of Steuart Street, just south of Market Street, near the Ferry Building. Ten bystanders were killed by the explosion; 40 more were wounded.

Two radical labor leaders, Thomas Mooney and Warren K. Billings, were subsequently arrested and tried for the attack. In the trial that followed, complete with false witnesses and biased jury foremen, the two men were convicted, despite widespread belief that they had been framed by the prosecution. Mooney was sentenced to death; after evidence surfaced as to the corrupt nature of the prosecution, President Woodrow Wilson called on California Governor William Stephens to look further into the case. Two weeks before Mooney’s scheduled execution, Stephens commuted his sentence to life imprisonment, the same punishment Billings had received. Investigation into the case continued over the next two decades; by 1939, evidence of perjury and false testimony at the trial had so mounted that Governor Culbert Olson pardoned both men. The true identity of the Preparedness Day bomber (or bombers) remains unknown.

[JoGee]

(June 23)

1878 ~
Black Bart strikes again

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Black Bart robs a Wells Fargo stagecoach in California. Wearing a flour sack over his head, the armed robber stole the small safe box with less than $400 and a passenger’s diamond ring and watch. When the empty box was recovered, a taunting poem signed “Black Bart” was found inside:

Here I lay me down to sleep to wait the coming morrow,Perhaps success, perhaps defeatAnd everlasting sorrow,

Yet come what will, I’ll try it once,My conditions can’t be worse,And if there’s money in that box,’Tis money in my purse.

This wasn’t the first time that Black Bart had robbed a stagecoach and left a poem for the police; however, it was the last time he got away with it. His next stagecoach robbery secured a lot more cash, $4,800. At yet another robbery, on November 3, 1888, though, he left behind a handkerchief at the scene.Through a laundry mark, Pinkerton detectives traced the handkerchief back to Charles Bolton, an elderly man in San Francisco.

Bolton later confessed to being Black Bart but bitterly disputed his reputation as an outlaw. “I am a gentleman,” he told detectives with great dignity. How Bolton became Black Bart is unclear. What is known is that Bolton had tried to hit it big in the Gold Rush, but had ended up with a lifestyle beyond his means.

Black Bart ended up serving only a short stretch in prison and spent the rest of his days in Nevada.

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(Okay, now I'm hearing the Faygo song about Black Bart, and their Old Fashioned Root Beer!)

[JoGee]

(July 24)

1911
Machu Picchu discovered

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On July 24, 1911, American archeologist Hiram Bingham gets his first look at Machu Picchu, an ancient Inca settlement in Peru that is now one of the world’s top tourist destinations.

Tucked away in the rocky countryside northwest of Cuzco, Machu Picchu is believed to have been a summer retreat for Inca leaders, whose civilization was virtually wiped out by Spanish invaders in the 16th century. For hundreds of years afterwards, its existence was a secret known only to the peasants living in the region. That all changed in the summer of 1911, when Bingham arrived with a small team of explorers to search for the famous “lost” cities of the Incas.

Traveling on foot and by mule, Bingham and his team made their way from Cuzco into the Urubamba Valley, where a local farmer told them of some ruins located at the top of a nearby mountain. The farmer called the mountain Machu Picchu, which meant “Old Peak” in the native Quechua language. The next day–July 24–after a tough climb to the mountain’s ridge in cold and drizzly weather, Bingham met a small group of peasants who showed him the rest of the way. Led by an 11-year-old boy, Bingham got his first glimpse of the intricate network of stone terraces marking the entrance to Machu Picchu.

The excited Bingham spread the word about his discovery in a best-selling book, sending hordes of eager tourists flocking to Peru to follow in his footsteps up the Inca trail. The site itself stretches an impressive five miles, with over 3,000 stone steps linking its many different levels. Today, more than 300,000 people tramp through Machu Picchu every year, braving crowds and landslides to see the sun set over the towering stone monuments of the “Sacred City” and marvel at the mysterious splendor of one of the world’s most famous man-made wonders.

[JoGee]

(July 25)

1978 ~
World’s First Test Tube Baby Born

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On this day in 1978, Louise Joy Brown, the world’s first baby to be conceived via in vitro fertilization (IVF) is born at Oldham and District General Hospital in Manchester, England, to parents Lesley and Peter Brown. The healthy baby was delivered shortly before midnight by caesarean section and weighed in at five pounds, 12 ounces.

Before giving birth to Louise, Lesley Brown had suffered years of infertility due to blocked fallopian tubes. In November 1977, she underwent the then-experimental IVF procedure. A mature egg was removed from one of her ovaries and combined in a laboratory dish with her husband’s sperm to form an embryo. The embryo then was implanted into her uterus a few days later. Her IVF doctors, British gynecologist Patrick Steptoe and scientist Robert Edwards, had begun their pioneering collaboration a decade earlier. Once the media learned of the pregnancy, the Browns faced intense public scrutiny. Louise’s birth made headlines around the world and raised various legal and ethical questions.

The Browns had a second daughter, Natalie, several years later, also through IVF. In May 1999, Natalie became the first IVF baby to give birth to a child of her own. The child’s conception was natural, easing some concerns that female IVF babies would be unable to get pregnant naturally. In December 2006, Louise Brown, the original “test tube baby,” gave birth to a boy, Cameron John Mullinder, who also was conceived naturally.

Today, IVF is considered a mainstream medical treatment for infertility. Hundreds of thousands of children around the world have been conceived through the procedure, in some cases with donor eggs and sperm.

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[JoGee]

(July 26)

1956
Egypt nationalizes the Suez Canal

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The Suez Crisis begins when Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalizes the British and French-owned Suez Canal.

The Suez Canal, which connects the Mediterranean and Red Seas across Egypt, was completed by French engineers in 1869. For the next 87 years, it remained largely under British and French control, and Europe depended on it as an inexpensive shipping route for oil from the Middle East.

After World War II, Egypt pressed for evacuation of British troops from the Suez Canal Zone, and in July 1956 President Nasser nationalized the canal, hoping to charge tolls that would pay for construction of a massive dam on the Nile River. In response, Israel invaded in late October, and British and French troops landed in early November, occupying the canal zone. Under Soviet, U.S., and U.N. pressure, Britain and France withdrew in December, and Israeli forces departed in March 1957. That month, Egypt took control of the canal and reopened it to commercial shipping.

Ten years later, Egypt shut down the canal again following the Six Day War and Israel’s occupation of the Sinai peninsula. For the next eight years, the Suez Canal, which separates the Sinai from the rest of Egypt, existed as the front line between the Egyptian and Israeli armies. In 1975, Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat reopened the Suez Canal as a gesture of peace after talks with Israel. Today, an average of 50 ships navigate the canal daily, carrying more than 300 million tons of goods a year.

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[JoGee]

(July 27)

1991
Natalie Cole’s Unforgettable: With Love goes to #1

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Fifteen years and five #1 hits after breaking into the music industry by working in a style completely different from her famous father’s, Natalie Cole stopped distancing herself from Nat King Cole’s musical legacy and instead embraced it, recording an entire album of standards from her father’s old repertoire. Though it exposed her to charges of exploiting his memory, it also gave Cole the biggest hit album of her professional career: Unforgettable: With Love, which climbed to the top of the Billboard 200 album chart on July 27, 1991

Natalie Cole began her career with the #1 R&B hit "This Will Be (An Everlasting Love)” (1975) and followed it with four more in the same vein: “Inseparable” (1976); “Sophisticated Lady (She’s A Different Lady)” (1976); “I’ve Got Love On My Mind” (1977); and “Our Love” (1978). She was awarded the Grammy for Best New Artist of 1975 and won the award for Best R&B Vocal Performance, Female, in both 1975 and 1976, ending a run of eight straight wins in that category by Aretha Franklin. A severe drug problem would plague Natalie Cole through the first phase of her professional career, even as she continued to turn out albums on a nearly annual basis. By the time she left her drug habit behind in the early 1980s, however, Cole’s popularity was a thing of the past.

Unforgettable: With Love marked a significant shift in both musical direction and career fortunes for Natalie Cole. The album comprised 22 songs from the Nat King Cole catalog, including solo performances of "Route 66,” “Mona Lisa,” and “Straighten Up And Fly Right” as well as a “duet” between Natalie and her father on his biggest hit of all, “Unforgettable.” The skillful production work on “Unforgettable” may not have entirely removed the creepiness factor of a daughter singing with her dead father, but the song swept every eligible category in at the 1991 Grammy Awards: Song of the Year, Record of the Year and Best Traditional Pop Performance. Its success on the radio also helped Unforgettable: With Love sell more than 8 million copies, win the Grammy for Album of the Year and, on this day in 1991, top the Billboard album charts.

[JoGee]

(July 28)

1868
14th Amendment adopted

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Following its ratification by the necessary three-quarters of U.S. states, the 14th Amendment, guaranteeing to African Americans citizenship and all its privileges, is officially adopted into the U.S. Constitution.

Two years after the Civil War, the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 divided the South into five military districts, where new state governments, based on universal manhood suffrage, were to be established. Thus began the period known as Radical Reconstruction, which saw the 14th Amendment, which had been passed by Congress in 1866, ratified in July 1868. The amendment resolved pre-Civil War questions of African American citizenship by stating that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States…are citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside.” The amendment then reaffirmed the privileges and rights of all citizens, and granted all these citizens the “equal protection of the laws.”

In the decades after its adoption, the equal protection clause was cited by a number of African American activists who argued that racial segregation denied them the equal protection of law. However, in 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Fergusonthat states could constitutionally provide segregated facilities for African Americans, so long as they were equal to those afforded white persons. The Plessy v. Fergusondecision, which announced federal toleration of the so-called “separate but equal” doctrine, was eventually used to justify segregating all public facilities, including railroad cars, restaurants, hospitals, and schools. However, “colored” facilities were never equal to their white counterparts, and African Americans suffered through decades of debilitating discrimination in the South and elsewhere. In 1954, Plessy v. Ferguson was finally struck down by the Supreme Court in its ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

[JoGee]

(July 29)

1958 ~.
NASA created

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On this day in 1958, the U.S. Congress passes legislation establishing the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a civilian agency responsible for coordinating America’s activities in space. NASA has since sponsored space expeditions, both human and mechanical, that have yielded vital information about the solar system and universe. It has also launched numerous earth-orbiting satellites that have been instrumental in everything from weather forecasting to navigation to global communications.

NASA was created in response to the Soviet Union’s October 4, 1957 launch of its first satellite, Sputnik I. The 183-pound, basketball-sized satellite orbited the earth in 98 minutes. The Sputnik launch caught Americans by surprise and sparked fears that the Soviets might also be capable of sending missiles with nuclear weapons from Europe to America. The United States prided itself on being at the forefront of technology, and, embarrassed, immediately began developing a response, signaling the start of the U.S.-Soviet space race.

On November 3, 1957, the Soviets launched Sputnik II,which carrieda dog named Laika. In December, America attempted to launch a satellite of its own, called Vanguard, but it exploded shortly after takeoff. On January 31, 1958, things went better with Explorer I, the first U.S. satellite to successfully orbit the earth. In July of that year, Congress passed legislation officially establishing NASA from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and other government agencies, and confirming the country’s commitment to winning the space race. In May 1961, President John F. Kennedydeclared thatAmerica should put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. On July 20, 1969, NASA’s Apollo 11 mission achieved that goal and made history when astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the moon, saying “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

NASA has continued to make great advances in space exploration since the first moonwalk, including playing a major part in the construction of the International Space Station. The agency has also suffered tragic setbacks, however, such as the disasters that killed the crews of the Challenger space shuttle in 1986 and the Columbia space shuttle in 2003. In 2004, President George Bush challenged NASA to return to the moon by 2020 and establish “an extended human presence” there that could serve as a launching point for “human missions to Mars and to worlds beyond.”



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