29 June Births 1136 – Petronilla of Aragon (d. 1173) 1398 – John II of Aragon (d. 1479) 1475 – Beatrice d'Este, Italian wife of Ludovico Sforza (d. 1497) 1482 – Maria of Aragon, Queen of Portugal (d. 1517) 1517 – Rembert Dodoens, Flemish physician and botanist (d. 1585) 1596 – Emperor Go-Mizunoo of Japan (d. 1680) 1746 – Joachim Heinrich Campe, German linguist, educator, and author (d. 1818) 1793 – Josef Ressel, Czech-Austrian inventor, invented the propeller (d. 1857) 1798 – Willibald Alexis, German author (d. 1871) 1798 – Giacomo Leopardi, Italian poet and philosopher (d. 1837) 1844 – Peter I of Serbia (d. 1921) 1849 – Pedro Montt, Chilean politician, 15th President of Chile (d. 1910) 1849 – Sergei Witte, Russian politician, 1st Chairmen of Council of Ministers of the Russian Empire (d. 1915) 1803 – John Newton Brown, American minister and author (d. 1868) 1818 – Angelo Secchi, Italian astronomer (d. 1878) 1849 – John Hunn, American businessman and politician, 51st Governor of Delaware (d. 1926) 1858 – George Washington Goethals, American general and engineer, co-designed the Panama Canal (d. 1928) 1858 – Julia Lathrop, American activist (d. 1932) 1861 – William James Mayo, American physician, co-founded the Mayo Clinic (d. 1939) 1863 – Wilbert Robinson, American baseball player, coach, and manager (d. 1934) 1865 – Shigechiyo Izumi, Japanese centenarian (d. 1986) 1868 – George Ellery Hale, American astronomer (d. 1938) 1870 – Joseph Carl Breil, American tenor, composer, and director (d. 1926) 1873 – Leo Frobenius, German ethnologist and archaeologist (d. 1938) 1877 – Ruurd Leegstra, Dutch rower (d. 1933) 1879 – Benedetto Aloisi Masella, Italian cardinal (d. 1970) 1879 – Zsigmond Móricz, Hungarian author (d. 1942) 1880 – Ludwig Beck, German general (d. 1944) 1881 – Harry Frazee, American director, producer, and agent (d. 1929) 1881 – Curt Sachs, German-American musicologist (d. 1959) 1882 – Franz Seldte, German politician (d. 1947) 1886 – Robert Schuman, Luxembourgian-French politician, Prime Minister of France (d. 1963) 1886 – James Van Der Zee, American photographer (d. 1983) 1888 – Alexander Friedmann, Russian physicist and mathematician (d. 1925) 1888 – Squizzy Taylor, Australian gangster (d. 1927) 1889 – Willie MacFarlane, Scottish golfer (d. 1961) 1890 – Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper, Dutch super-centenarian (d. 2005) 1892 – Henry Gerber, German-American activist, founded the Society for Human Rights (d. 1972) 1893 – Aarre Merikanto, Finnish composer (d. 1958) 1893 – Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, Indian scientist and statistician (d. 1972) 1897 – Fulgence Charpentier, Canadian journalist (d. 2001) 1898 – Yvonne Lefébure, French pianist and educator (d. 1986) 1900 – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, French poet and pilot (d. 1944) 1901 – Nelson Eddy, American singer and actor (d. 1967) 1903 – Alan Blumlein, English engineer, developed the H2S radar (d. 1942) 1903 – Paul Newlan, American actor (d. 1973) 1906 – Ivan Chernyakhovsky, Ukrainian general (d. 1945) 1906 – Heinz Harmel, German general (d. 2000) 1908 – Leroy Anderson, American composer and conductor (d. 1975) 1910 – Frank Loesser, American composer (d. 1969) 1910 – Burgess Whitehead, American baseball player (d. 1993) 1911 – Prince Bernhard of Lippe-Biesterfeld (d. 2004) 1911 – Katherine DeMille, Canadian-American actress (d. 1995) 1911 – Bernard Herrmann, American composer (d. 1975) 1912 – José Pablo Moncayo, Mexican pianist, composer, and conductor (d. 1958) 1912 – Émile Peynaud, French oenologist (d. 2004) 1912 – John Toland, American historian and author (d. 2004) 1914 – Rafael Kubelík, Czech-American conductor and composer (d. 1996) 1914 – Christos Papakyriakopoulos, Greek mathematician (d. 1976) 1916 – Ruth Warrick, American actress and singer (d. 2005) 1919 – Ernesto Corripio y Ahumada, Mexican cardinal (d. 2008) 1919 – Slim Pickens, American actor (d. 1983) 1919 – Lloyd Richards, Canadian-American actor and director (d. 2006) 1920 – César Rodríguez Álvarez, Spanish footballer and manager (d. 1995) 1920 – Ray Harryhausen, American animator and producer (d. 2013) 1920 – Nicole Russell, Duchess of Bedford (d. 2012) 1921 – Frédéric Dard, French author (d. 2000) 1921 – Jean Kent, English actress (d. 2013) 1921 – Reinhard Mohn, German businessman (d. 2009) 1921 – Harry Schell, American race car driver (d. 1960) 1922 – Vasko Popa, Serbian poet (d. 1991) 1922 – John William Vessey, Jr., American general 1923 – Chou Wen-chung, Chinese-American composer 1924 – Ezra Laderman, American composer 1924 – Flo Sandon's, Italian singer (d. 2006) 1925 – Giorgio Napolitano, Italian politician, 11th President of Italy 1925 – Chan Parker, American dancer (d. 1999) 1925 – Hale Smith, American pianist and composer (d. 2009) 1925 – Jackie Lynn Taylor, American actress (d. 2014) 1925 – Cara Williams, American actress and singer 1926 – Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, Kuwaiti ruler, 3rd Emir of Kuwait (d. 2006) 1927 – Pierre Perrault, Canadian director and screenwriter (d. 1999) 1928 – Ian Bannen, Scottish actor (d. 1999) 1928 – Jean-Louis Pesch, French author and illustrator 1928 – Radius Prawiro, Indonesian economist and politician (d. 2005) 1929 – Pat Crawford Brown, American actress 1929 – Oriana Fallaci, Italian journalist and author (d. 2006) 1930 – Robert Evans, American actor and producer 1930 – Viola Léger, American-Canadian actress and politician 1930 – Sławomir Mrożek, Polish-French author and playwright (d. 2013) 1931 – Ed Gilbert, American actor (d. 1999) 1932 – Brian Hutton, Baron Hutton, Irish politician, Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland 1933 – Bob Shaw, American baseball player (d. 2010) 1933 – John Bradshaw, American theologian and author 1934 – Corey Allen, American actor, director, and producer (d. 2010) 1934 – Chuck Schaden, American historian and radio host 1935 – Vassilis C. Constantakopoulos, Greek captain and ship-owner (d. 2011) 1935 – Katsuya Nomura, Japanese baseball player and manager 1936 – Harmon Killebrew, American baseball player and sportscaster (d. 2011) 1939 – Alan Connolly, Australian cricketer 1939 – Lo Lieh, Hong Kong martial artist, actor, and director (d. 2002) 1939 – Amarildo Tavares da Silveira, Brazilian footballer and coach 1940 – Vyacheslav Artyomov, Russian composer 1941 – John Boccabella, American baseball player 1941 – Stokely Carmichael, Trinidadian-American activist (d. 1998) 1941 – Margitta Gummel, German shot putter 1942 – Paul Lorieau, Canadian singer (d. 2013) 1942 – Mike Willesee, Australian journalist 1943 – Little Eva, American singer (d. 2003) 1944 – Gary Busey, American actor 1944 – Seán Patrick O'Malley, American cardinal 1945 – Chandrika Kumaratunga, Sri Lankan politician, 5th President of Sri Lanka 1946 – Ernesto Pérez Balladares, Panamanian politician, 33rd President of Panama 1946 – Egon von Fürstenberg, Swiss fashion designer (d. 2004) 1947 – Michael Carter, Scottish actor 1947 – Richard Lewis, American comedian and actor 1948 – Sean Bergin, South African-Dutch saxophonist and flute player (d. 2012) 1948 – Fred Grandy, American actor and politician 1948 – Ian Paice, English drummer, songwriter, and producer (Deep Purple and Paice Ashton Lord) 1949 – Dan Dierdorf, American football player and sportscaster 1949 – Joan Clos i Matheu, Spanish politician, 116th Mayor of Barcelona 1949 – Ann Veneman, American politician 1949 – Greg Burson, American voice actor (d. 2008) 1950 – Don Moen, American singer-songwriter and producer 1951 – Don Rosa, American author and illustrator 1953 – Don Dokken, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (Dokken) 1953 – Colin Hay, Scottish-Australian singer, guitarist, and actor (Men at Work) 1954 – Rick Honeycutt, American baseball player and coach 1954 – Leovegildo Lins da Gama Júnior, Brazilian footballer, coach, and manager 1955 – Terence M. O'Sullivan, American activist 1955 – Charles J. Precourt, American colonel, pilot, and astronaut 1956 – Nick Fry, English economist and businessman 1956 – Pedro Guerrero, Dominican-American baseball player 1956 – Pedro Santana Lopes, Portuguese politician, 118th Prime Minister of Portugal 1956 – A. K. Shiva Kumar, Indian economist 1956 – Pyotr Vasilevsky, Belarusian footballer and manager (d. 2012) 1957 – Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, Turkmen politician, 2nd President of Turkmenistan 1957 – María Conchita Alonso, Cuban-Venezuelan singer and actress 1957 – Robert Forster, Australian singer-songwriter and guitarist (The Go-Betweens and Tuff Monks) 1957 – Michael Nutter, American politician, 98th Mayor of Philadelphia 1958 – Dieter Althaus, German politician 1958 – Jeff Coopwood, American actor and singer 1958 – Rosa Mota, Portuguese runner 1958 – Mark Radcliffe, English singer and radio host (Shirehorses and The Family Mahone) 1958 – Ralf Rangnick, German footballer and manager 1959 – Buren Fowler, American guitarist (Drivin N Cryin) (d. 2014) 1961 – Kimberlin Brown, American actress 1961 – Greg Hetson, American singer and guitarist (Bad Religion, Circle Jerks, Black President, and Redd Kross) 1961 – Sharon Lawrence, American actress 1962 – Amanda Donohoe, English actress 1962 – Joan Laporta, Spanish lawyer and politician 1962 – George D. Zamka, American colonel, pilot, and astronaut 1963 – Khalid El-Masri, German kidnapped victim 1963 – Anne-Sophie Mutter, German violinist 1964 – Stedman Pearson, English singer-songwriter and dancer (Five Star) 1965 – Tripp Eisen, American guitarist (Static-X, Dope, and Murderdolls) 1965 – Panagiotis Karatzas, Greek basketball player 1966 – Yoko Kamio, Japanese illustrator 1966 – John Part, Canadian darts player 1967 – Jeff Burton, American race car driver 1967 – Murray Foster, Canadian bass player (Moxy Früvous and Great Big Sea) 1967 – Melora Hardin, American actress and singer 1967 – Seamus McGarvey, Irish cinematographer 1968 – Theoren Fleury, Canadian ice hockey player 1968 – Judith Hoag, American actress and educator 1969 – Claude Béchard, Canadian politician (d. 2010) 1969 – Pavlos Dermitzakis, Greek footballer and manager 1969 – Tōru Hashimoto, Japanese lawyer and politician 1969 – Ilan Mitchell-Smith, American actor 1970 – Melanie Paschke, German sprinter 1970 – Emily Skinner, American actress and singer 1970 – Mike Vallely, American skateboarder and actor 1971 – Kaitlyn Ashley, American porn actress 1971 – Matthew Good, Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist (Matthew Good Band) 1971 – Anthony Hamilton, English snooker player 1972 – DJ Shadow, American DJ and producer (Unkle) 1972 – Samantha Smith, American actress, author, and activist (d. 1985) 1972 – Külli Tomingas, Estonian opera singer 1972 – Nawal Al Zoghbi, Lebanese singer 1973 – George Hincapie, American cyclist 1976 – Daniel Carlsson, Swedish race car driver 1976 – Bret McKenzie, New Zealand comedian, actor, guitarist, and producer (Flight of the Conchords, The Black Seeds, So You're a Man, and Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra) 1977 – Sotiris Liberopoulos, Greek footballer 1977 – Zuleikha Robinson, English actress and singer 1978 – Sam Farrar, American singer and bass player (Phantom Planet) 1978 – Nicole Scherzinger, American singer-songwriter, dancer, and actress (Pussycat Dolls and Eden's Crush) 1979 – Barış Akarsu, Turkish singer and actor (d. 2007) 1979 – Matthew Bode, Australian footballer 1979 – Abz Love, English singer and DJ (Five) 1979 – Andy O'Brien, English footballer 1979 – Marleen Veldhuis, Dutch swimmer 1980 – Katherine Jenkins, Welsh soprano 1980 – Melissa Peachey, English television host 1980 – Martin Truex Jr, American race car driver 1981 – Nino, Greek singer-songwriter 1981 – Joe Johnson, American basketball player 1981 – Nicolás Vuyovich, Argentinian race car driver (d. 2005) 1982 – Dusty Hughes, American baseball player 1982 – Ott Sepp, Estonian actor 1982 – Matthew Mercer, American voice actor 1983 – Aundrea Fimbres, American singer-songwriter and dancer (Danity Kane) 1983 – Jeremy Powers, American cyclist 1984 – Christopher Egan, Australian actor 1984 – Han Ji-hye, South Korean actress 1984 – Derek Lee Rock, American drummer (Mêlée and Suburban Legends) 1985 – Quintin Demps, American football player 1986 – José Manuel Jurado, Spanish footballer 1986 – Edward Maya, Romanian singer-songwriter and producer 1987 – Ana Free, Portuguese singer-songwriter 1987 – Luke McLean, Australian-Italian rugby player 1987 – Yasuka Saitō, Japanese actor 1987 – Ilya Shesterkov, Russian footballer 1988 – Éver Banega, Argentinian footballer 1988 – Elnur Mammadli, Azerbaijani martial artist 1988 – Becky Taylor, English singer 1990 – Yann M'Vila, French footballer 1990 – Sayuri Sugawara, Japanese singer 1991 – Soren Fulton, American actor 1991 – Suk Hyun-Jun, South Korean footballer 1991 – Addison Timlin, American actress 1992 – Adam G. Sevani, American actor and dancer 1993 – George Sampson, English actor and dancer 1993 – James Sanderson, Gibraltarian swimmer 1994 – Shin Dongho, South Korean singer and actor (U-KISS) D
Jun 29, 1943: FDR writes to Manhattan Project physicist Dr. Robert Oppenheimer On this day in 1943, President Franklin D. Roosevelt writes a letter marked "secret" to leading Manhattan Project physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. In the letter, Roosevelt sought to smooth over the growing antagonism between Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves, the military leader in charge of the project. Roosevelt began by congratulating Oppenheimer (or "Oppie" as he was known to colleagues and friends) on the progress of a "highly important and secret program of research, development and manufacture with which you are familiar." No mention was made, of course, of the phrase "Manhattan Project" or "atomic bomb." Roosevelt conveyed a sense of urgency in solving "the problem" and bringing the project to fruition. He stressed the project's bearing on national security. Roosevelt's letter acknowledged Oppenheimer as the leader of an elite group of scientists operating under strict security and under "very special conditions." He had received reports that the brain trust of scientists tapped to deliver an atomic weapon were starting to snap under the pressure of trying to meet what they saw as an impossible deadline. Oppenheimer and Groves frequently clashed over the scientists living and working conditions. The small isolated community resented living under heavy guard in the desert of New Mexico. Many of the experts had doubts the bomb could even be built at all and questioned the wisdom of working with such dangerous material. Roosevelt appealed to Oppenheimer to convince the group of the necessity of the restrictions and asked him to convey his appreciation for their hard work and personal sacrifice. Roosevelt expressed his faith that "whatever the enemy may be planning, American science will be equal to the challenge." The letter reflected Roosevelt's natural ability to rally morale–whether it was subduing revolt among physicists working on a crucial new weapon or reassuring American mothers of the need for food rationing in a time of war. Two years later, at a test site near Alamogordo, New Mexico, the first atomic bomb was successfully detonated. Roosevelt would not live to decide whether or not to use the new and powerful weapon in World War II. He died on April 12, 1945, leaving the decision to his successor, Harry S. Truman. Truman authorized the use of the world's first atomic weapons against Japan on August 6 and 9, 1945. Jun 29, 1958: Pele helps Brazil to World Cup title On June 29, 1958, Brazil defeats host nation Sweden 5-2 to win its first World Cup. Brazil came into the tournament as a favorite, and did not disappoint, thrilling the world with their spectacular play, which was often referred to as the "beautiful game." The star of the tournament was an undersized midfielder named Edson Arondes do Nascimento, known the world over as Pele. Edson, the son of a professional footballer called Dodhino, was named for the American inventor, Thomas Edison. His mother, having watched her husband struggle to earn money in the game, discouraged Pele from playing football. Pele’s will won out, and at 14 he was discovered by de Brito, a former Brazilian team member, who took the young scorer under his wing. Pele earned his first cap with the national team at 16, and made his debut on the international stage at the 1958 World Cup in Sweden at 17 years old. In that year’s Cup, Pele did not make an appearance until Brazil’s third group play match against the Soviet Union, in which he set up a goal for Vava. His first goal came in the quarterfinal against Wales; it was the only goal Brazil scored in a 1-0 win. It was in the semifinal against France, though, that Pele truly came into his own. As the crowd at Rasunda Stadium listened to the Sweden-West Germany game on their radios, Pele put on a show of offensive brilliance against the second best team in the tournament. He scored three goals from his left side, and left the French team dumbfounded at their inability to contain a 17 year old. Pele and Vava scored two goals each in the final. Upon receiving the Jules Rimet Cup as the best team in the world, the entire team wept. Brazil went on to win the World Cup again in 1966 and 1970, which gave them the right to retain the Jules Rimet Cup permanently as the first country to win three World Cups. In 1999, the International Olympic Committee honored Pele along with 10 others as one of the best athletes of the century. Jun 29, 1964: First New Zealand troops arrive Twenty-four New Zealand Army engineers arrive in Saigon as a token of that country's support for the American effort in South Vietnam. The contingent was part of the Free World Military Forces, an effort by President Lyndon B. Johnson to enlist other nations to support the American cause in South Vietnam by sending military aid and troops. The level of support was not the primary issue; Johnson wanted to portray international solidarity and consensus for U.S. policies in Southeast Asia and he believed that participation by a number of countries would achieve that end. The effort was also known as the "many flags" program. In June 1965, New Zealand increased their commitment to the war with the arrival of the Royal New Zealand Artillery's 161st Battery. Two rifle companies from the Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment arrived in South Vietnam in 1967 along with a platoon from New Zealand's commando force, the Special Air Service. These New Zealand forces were integrated with the forces of the Australian Task Force and operated with them in Phuoc Tuy Province, southeast of Saigon along the coast. In 1971, New Zealand withdrew its military forces from South Vietnam. Jun 29, 1966: Vietnam air war escalates During the Vietnam War, U.S. aircraft bomb the major North Vietnamese population centers of Hanoi and Haiphong for the first time, destroying oil depots located near the two cities. The U.S. military hoped that by bombing Hanoi, the capital of North Vietnam, and Haiphong, North Vietnam's largest port, communist forces would be deprived of essential military supplies and thus the ability to wage war. In 1961, U.S. President John F. Kennedy sent the first large force of U.S. military personnel to Vietnam to bolster the ineffectual autocratic regime of South Vietnam against communist forces. Three years later, with the South Vietnamese government crumbling, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered limited bombing raids on North Vietnam, and Congress authorized the use of U.S. ground troops. By 1965, Vietcong and North Vietnamese offensives left President Johnson with two choices: escalate U.S. involvement or withdraw. Johnson ordered the former, and troop levels soon jumped to more than 300,000 as U.S. air forces commenced the largest bombing campaign in history. However, as the Vietcong were able to fight with an average daily flow of only 20 tons of supplies from North Vietnam, and U.S. forces in Vietnam required 1,000 times as much, the bombing of communist industry and supply routes had little impact on the course of the war. Nevertheless, North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh placed the destruction of U.S. bombers in the forefront of his war effort, and by 1969 more than 5,000 American planes had been lost. In addition, the extended length of the war, the high number of U.S. casualties, and the exposure of U.S. involvement in war crimes such as the massacre at My Lai turned many in the United States against the Vietnam War. In 1973, representatives of the United States and North and South Vietnam signed a peace agreement in Paris, ending the U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War. On April 30, 1975, the last few Americans still in South Vietnam were airlifted out of the country as Saigon fell to communist forces. The Vietnam War was the longest and most unpopular foreign war in U.S. history and cost 58,000 American lives. As many as two million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians were killed. Jun 29, 1967: The Stones fight the law, and the law wins On June 29, 1967, Keith Richards sat before magistrates in Chichester, West Sussex, England, facing charges that stemmed from the infamous raid of Richards' Redlands estate five months earlier. Though the raid netted very little in the way of actual drugs, what it did net was a great deal of notoriety for the already notorious Rolling Stones. It was during this raid that the police famously encountered a young Marianne Faithfull clad only in a bearskin rug, a fact that the prosecutor in the case seemed to regard as highly relevant to the case at hand. In questioning Richards, Queen's Counsel Malcolm Morris tried to imply that Faithfull's nudity was probably the result of a loss of inhibition due to cannabis use: QC Morris: Would you agree in the ordinary course of events you would expect a young woman to be embarrassed if she had nothing on but a rug in the presence of eight men, two of whom were hangers-on and the third a Moroccan servant? Richards: Not at all Morris: You regard that, do you, as quite normal? Richards: "We are not old men. We are not worried about petty morals." With that one line, Richards emphatically established himself as the spokesman for a generation that did not share the values of the British establishment. The charges brought against him by that establishment, however, were quite serious. While Mick Jagger stood charged with illegal possession of four amphetamine tablets he'd purchased in Italy, Richards faced the far more serious charge of allowing his house to be used for the purpose of smoking what the law at the time referred to as "Indian hemp." Judging from his defiant attitude on the stand, Richards may not have taken the possibility of conviction very seriously. No marijuana had actually been found in Richards' possession, but on the evidence presented at trial of a "sweet incense smell" detected by police, Richards was convicted and sentenced to one year in prison. Jagger was also convicted and sentenced to three months, but he was immediately released pending an appeal. Richards, on the other hand, was sent directly to Wormwood Scrubs prison on this day in 1969, where he was greeted like, well, a rock star by his fellow inmates. Richards would spend only one night in prison, though, as he was granted bail the following day, also pending appeal. His conviction would later be overturned based on the prejudicial nature of the evidence of the naked young woman in a bearskin rug. For his part, Richards was definitively pleased: "I like a little more room, I like the john to be in a separate area," he later said, "and I hate to be woken up." Jun 29, 1967: Actress Jayne Mansfield dies in car crash Blonde bombshell actress Jayne Mansfield is killed instantly on this day in 1967 when the car in which she is riding strikes the rear of a trailer truck on Interstate-90 east of New Orleans, Louisiana. Mansfield had been on her way to New Orleans from Biloxi, Mississippi, where she had been performing a standing engagement at a local nightclub; she had a television appearance scheduled the following day. Ronald B. Harrison, a driver for the Gus Stevens Dinner Club, was driving Mansfield and her lawyer and companion, Samuel S. Brody, along with three of Mansfield's children with her ex-husband Mickey Hargitay, in Stevens' 1966 Buick Electra. On a dark stretch of road, just as the truck was approaching a machine emitting a thick white fog used to spray mosquitoes (which may have obscured it from Harrison's view), the Electra hit the trailer-truck from behind. Mansfield, Harrison and Brody were all killed in the accident. Eight-year-old Mickey, six-year-old Zoltan and three-year-old Marie, or Mariska, had apparently been sleeping on the rear seat; they were injured but survived. Born Vera Jayne Palmer in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, Mansfield arrived in Hollywood as a young wife and mother (to daughter Jayne Marie) in 1954, determined to become an actress. From the beginning, she wasn't afraid to make the most of her assets, particularly her curvaceous figure, flowing platinum blonde hair and dazzling smile. Cast in the Broadway comedy "Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?", she turned heads as a voluptuous, dumb blonde movie star; in one famous scene she appeared in nothing but a white towel. She famously appeared nude in the 1963 comedy "Promises! Promises!", and stills from the set appeared in Playboy magazine, but her best performance was generally believed to have been in 1957's "The Wayward Bus," based on the John Steinbeck novel and costarring Joan Collins. While her screen career amounted to about a dozen less-than-memorable films, off screen she played the movie star role to perfection, and became one of the most visible glamour girls of the era. In 1958, after her first marriage ended in divorce, she married Hargitay, a former Mr. Universe; they divorced in 1963, and Mansfield was married once more, to Matt Climber, in 1964. That marriage also ended in divorce and she was awarded custody of their child, Octabiano. Mariska Hargitay, injured in the accident that killed her mother, later launched her own acting career, most memorably starring in the long-running television drama "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit." Jun 29, 1970: U.S. ground troops return from Cambodia U.S. ground combat troops end two months of operations in Cambodia and return to South Vietnam. Military officials reported 354 Americans had been killed and 1,689 were wounded in the operation. The South Vietnamese reported 866 killed and 3,724 wounded. About 34,000 South Vietnamese troops remained in Cambodia. U.S. and South Vietnamese forces had launched a limited "incursion" into Cambodia to clear North Vietnamese sanctuaries 20 miles inside the Cambodian border. Some 50,000 South Vietnamese soldiers and 30,000 U.S. troops were involved, making it the largest operation of the war since Operation Junction City in 1967. The incursion into Cambodia had given the antiwar movement in the United States a new rallying point. News of the crossing into Cambodia set off a wave of antiwar demonstrations, including one at Kent State University that resulted in the killing of four students by Army National Guard troops, and another at Jackson State in Mississippi resulting in the shooting of two students when police opened fire on a women's dormitory. The incursion also angered many in Congress, who felt that Nixon was illegally widening the scope of the war; this resulted in a series of congressional resolutions and legislative initiatives that would severely limit the executive power of the president. Jun 29, 1972: Supreme Court strikes down death penalty In Furman v. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court rules by a vote of 5-4 that capital punishment, as it is currently employed on the state and federal level, is unconstitutional. The majority held that, in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, the death penalty qualified as "cruel and unusual punishment," primarily because states employed execution in "arbitrary and capricious ways," especially in regard to race. It was the first time that the nation's highest court had ruled against capital punishment. However, because the Supreme Court suggested new legislation that could make death sentences constitutional again, such as the development of standardized guidelines for juries that decide sentences, it was not an outright victory for opponents of the death penalty. In 1976, with 66 percent of Americans still supporting capital punishment, the Supreme Court acknowledged progress made in jury guidelines and reinstated the death penalty under a "model of guided discretion." In 1977, Gary Gilmore, a career criminal who had murdered an elderly couple because they would not lend him their car, was the first person to be executed since the end of the ban. Defiantly facing a firing squad in Utah, Gilmore's last words to his executioners before they shot him through the heart were, "Let's do it."
29 June Deaths 67 (c.) – Paul the Apostle, preacher, teacher and writer (b. [c.] 5) 226 – Cao Pi, Chinese emperor (b. 187) 1059 – Bernard II, Duke of Saxony (b. 995) 1149 – Raymond of Poitiers (b. 1115) 1252 – Abel, King of Denmark (b. 1218) 1509 – Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby (b. 1443) 1520 – Moctezuma II, Aztec ruler (b. 1466) 1575 – Baba Nobuharu, Japanese samurai (b. 1515) 1594 – Niels Kaas, Danish politician (b. 1535) 1725 – Arai Hakuseki, Japanese educator and politician (b. 1657) 1744 – André Campra, French composer and conductor (b. 1660) 1764 – Ralph Allen, English businessman and philanthropist (b. 1693) 1779 – Anton Raphael Mengs, German painter (b. 1728) 1831 – Heinrich Friedrich Karl vom und zum Stein, Prussian politician (b. 1757) 1840 – Lucien Bonaparte, French prince (b. 1775) 1852 – Henry Clay, American lawyer and politician, 9th United States Secretary of State (b. 1777) 1853 – Adrien-Henri de Jussieu, French botanist (b. 1797) 1855 – John Gorrie, American physician and humanitarian (b. 1803) 1860 – Thomas Addison, English physician (b. 1793) 1861 – Elizabeth Barrett Browning, English poet (b. 1806) 1873 – Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Indian poet (b. 1824) 1875 – Ferdinand I of Austria (b. 1793) 1895 – Thomas Henry Huxley, English biologist (b. 1825) 1895 – Floriano Peixoto, Brazilian marshal and politician, 2nd President of Brazil (b. 1839) 1900 – Ivan Mikheevich Pervushin, Russian mathematician (b. 1827) 1907 – Konstantinos Volanakis, Greek painter (b. 1837) 1919 – José Gregorio Hernández Venezuelan physician (b. 1864) 1921 – Otto Seeck German historian (b. 1850) 1931 – Nérée Beauchemin, Canadian poet and physician (b. 1850) 1933 – Roscoe Arbuckle, American actor, director, and screenwriter (b. 1887) 1935 – Jack O'Neill, American baseball player (b. 1873) 1936 – János Szlepecz, Slovene priest (b. 1872) 1940 – Paul Klee, Swiss painter (b. 1879) 1941 – Ignacy Jan Paderewski, Polish pianist, composer, and politician, 2nd Prime Minister of Poland (b. 1860) 1942 – Paul Troje, German politician, Mayor of Marburg (b. 1864) 1949 – Themistoklis Sofoulis, Greek politician (b. 1860) 1951 – Aimilios Veakis, Greek actor (b. 1884) 1952 – Alfred Braunschweiger, German diver (b. 1885) 1953 – Anton Koolmann, Estonian wrestler (b. 1899) 1955 – Max Pechstein, German painter (b. 1881) 1958 – Charles Spencelayh, English painter (b. 1865) 1959 – Geert Lotsij, Dutch rower (b. 1878) 1960 – Frank Patrick, Canadian ice hockey player and coach (b. 1885) 1964 – Eric Dolphy, American saxophonist, composer, and bandleader (b. 1928) 1967 – Primo Carnera, Italian boxer (b. 1906) 1967 – Jayne Mansfield, American actress and singer (b. 1933) 1969 – Shorty Long, American singer-songwriter and producer (b. 1940) 1969 – Moise Tshombe, Congolese politician (b. 1919) 1973 – Germán Valdés, Mexican actor and singer (b. 1915) 1975 – Tim Buckley, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1947) 1977 – Magda Lupescu, Romanian wife of Carol II of Romania (b. 1895) 1978 – Bob Crane, American actor and radio host (b. 1928) 1979 – Lowell George, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (Little Feat and The Mothers of Invention) (b. 1945) 1982 – Pierre Balmain, French fashion designer (b. 1914) 1982 – Henry King, American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1886) 1990 – Irving Wallace, American author and screenwriter (b. 1916) 1992 – Mohamed Boudiaf, Algerian politician (b. 1919) 1993 – Héctor Lavoe, Puerto Rican-American singer-songwriter (b. 1946) 1994 – Kurt Eichhorn, German conductor (b. 1908) 1994 – Jack Unterweger, Austrian serial killer (b. 1950) 1995 – Lana Turner, American actress and singer (b. 1921) 1997 – William Hickey, American actor (b. 1927) 1998 – Horst Jankowski, German pianist (b. 1936) 1999 – Karekin I, Syrian-Armenian patriarch (b. 1950) 1999 – Allan Carr, American screenwriter and producer (b. 1937) 2000 – Vittorio Gassman, Italian actor and director (b. 1922) 2002 – Rosemary Clooney, American singer and actress (b. 1928) 2002 – Ole-Johan Dahl, Norwegian computer scientist (b. 1931) 2002 – François Périer, French actor (b. 1919) 2003 – Katharine Hepburn, American actress and singer (b. 1907) 2004 – Bernard Babior, American physician and biochemist (b. 1935) 2004 – Alvin Hamilton, Canadian politician (b. 1912) 2006 – Fabián Bielinsky, Argentinian director and screenwriter (b. 1959) 2006 – Lloyd Richards, Canadian-American actor and director (b. 1919) 2006 – Randy Walker, American football player and coach (b. 1954) 2007 – Fred Saberhagen, American author (b. 1930) 2007 – Joel Siegel, American journalist and critic (b. 1943) 2007 – Edward Yang, Taiwanese director and screenwriter (b. 1947) 2008 – Don S. Davis, American actor (b. 1942) 2008 – Diane Hébert, Canadian medical patient (b. 1957) 2009 – Joe Bowman, American target shooter and boot-maker (b. 1925) 2012 – Takeo Chii, Japanese actor (b. 1942) 2012 – Verna Harrah, American film producer (b. 1944) 2012 – Graham Horn, English footballer (b. 1954) 2012 – Yong Nyuk Lin, Singaporean politician (b. 1918) 2012 – Mogale Paul Nkhumishe, South African bishop (b. 1938) 2012 – Vincent Ostrom, American political scientist (b. 1919) 2012 – Juan Reccius, Chilean triple jumper (b. 1911) 2012 – Floyd Temple, American baseball player, coach, and manager (b. 1926) 2012 – José Sótero Valero Ruz, Venezuelan bishop (b. 1936) 2013 – Harisinh Pratapsinh Chavda, Indian politician (b. 1930) 2013 – Peter Fitzgerald, Irish footballer (b. 1937) 2013 – Jack Gotta, American-Canadian football player, coach, and manager (b. 1929) 2013 – Sarah Guyard-Guillot, French-American acrobat (b. 1981) 2013 – Margherita Hack, Italian astrophysicist and author (b. 1922) 2013 – Jim Kelly, American actor and martial artist (b. 1946) 2013 – Victor Lundin, American actor and singer (b. 1930) 2013 – Ryūtarō Nakamura, Japanese animator and director (b. 1955) 2013 – Paul Smith, American pianist (b. 1922) 2013 – Larry Townsend, American politician (b. 1947) H
Jun 29, 1974: Isabela Peron takes office as Argentine president With Argentine President Juan Peron on his deathbed, Isabela Martinez de Peron, his wife and vice president, is sworn in as the leader of the South American country. President Isabela Peron, a former dancer and Peron's third wife, was the Western Hemisphere's first female head of government. Two days later, Juan died from heart disease, and Isabela was left alone as leader of a nation suffering from serious economic and political strife. In 1943, as an army officer, Juan Domingo Peron joined a military coup against Argentina's ineffectual civilian government. Appointed secretary of labor, his influence grew, and in 1944 he also became vice president and minister of war. In October 1945, Peron was ousted from his positions by a coup of constitutionally minded civilians and officers, and he was imprisoned, but appeals from workers and his charismatic mistress, Eva Duarte, soon forced his release. The night of his release, October 17, he addressed a crowd of some 300,000 people from the balcony of the presidential palace and promised to lead the people to victory in the coming presidential election. Four days later, Peron, a widower, married Eva Duarte, or "Evita," as she became affectionately known. As president, Peron constructed an impressive populist alliance, and his vision of self-sufficiency for Argentina won him wide support. However, he also became increasingly authoritarian, jailing political opponents and restricting freedom of the press. In 1952, his greatest political resource, Evita, died, and support for him dissolved. Three years later, he was ousted in a military coup. In 1973, after 18 years of exile, he returned to Argentina and won the presidency again. His third wife, Isabela Martinez de Peron, was elected as vice president and in 1974 succeeded him upon his death. President Isabela Peron was unable to command the support of any powerful group, let alone construct a necessary coalition, and the political and economic situation in Argentina worsened. On March 24, 1976, following a sharp rise in political terrorism and guerrilla activity, the military deposed Isabela Peron and instituted one of the bloodiest regimes in South American history. Isabela Peron was imprisoned for five years on a charge of abuse of property and upon her release in 1981 settled in Madrid. Jun 29, 1989: Congress votes new sanctions against China In yet another reaction to the Chinese government's brutal massacre of protesters in Tiananmen Square in Beijing earlier in the month, the House of Representatives unanimously passes a package of sanctions against the People's Republic of China. American indignation, however, was relatively short-lived and most of the sanctions died out after a brief period. On June 4, 1989, Chinese troops and police smashed into hundreds of thousands of protesters who had gathered in Tiananmen Square in central Beijing to protest for greater democracy and freedom. Thousands were killed and tens of thousands arrested. In the United States, the public and government reacted with horror. President George Bush immediately ordered sanctions against the Chinese government, including a ban on arms shipments, the cessation of high-level talks with Chinese officials, and a suspension of talks about nuclear cooperation. Bush hoped that these sanctions would be enough to indicate the American government's displeasure and anger over the events in Tiananmen Square, but many members of Congress felt that the president had not gone far enough in punishing China for its egregious human rights violations. Over Bush's objections, the House of Representations unanimously passed a new package of sanctions on June 29. The new package included the proviso that the previous sanctions enacted by Bush could not be lifted until there were assurances that China was making progress in the area of human rights. The new sanctions focused on economic and trade relations with China. They suspended talks and funds for the expansion of U.S.-Chinese trade, and also banned the shipment of police equipment to China. In the face of these sanctions, China remained largely unrepentant. It was not until May 1990 that the Chinese government began to release some of the thousands of protesters arrested the year before. However, diplomacy and economics eventually won out over moral indignation. The United States government had spent nearly 20 years trying to cultivate better relations with China, which it saw as a growing power and one that might be profitably used to balance against the Soviet Union. In addition, American businesspeople were filled with anticipation about the economic possibilities of the Chinese market. Finally, in 1991 the collapse of the Soviet Union meant the end of the Cold War, and all talk of "evil empires." In the face of these pressures and events, most of the sanctions fell by the wayside over the next few years. Jun 29, 1995: Seoul department store collapses The Sampoong department store in Seoul, South Korea, collapses on this day in 1995, killing more than 500 people. The tragedy in the upscale store occurred due to a series of errors made by the designers and contractors who built the store and the criminal negligence of the store's owner. Lee Joon built Sampoong on the site of a former rubbish dump in 1989. It was designed to have five floors but, in the middle of construction, Joon insisted that an extra floor with a swimming pool be added. Several engineers working on the project warned Joon that this change was dangerous but, rather than taking their advice, Joon fired them. Furthermore, Seoul's official planning department was not advised of the change and government safety inspectors monitoring the construction project were bribed, not only to cover up the design changes, but also to overlook the fact that Joon's contractors were not using enough steel rods for support and were using an inferior grade of concrete to save money. Twelve inspectors were later convicted of accepting bribes. By 1995, the store was very successful, with about 40,000 customers passing through its doors every day. On June 27, a gas leak was reported, but Joon refused to shut down the store. Two days later, the fifth-floor ceiling showed signs of imminent collapse. However, the only preventive measure taken was to move expensive merchandise out of the way. Some executives were also allowed to leave early. At about 6 p.m., hundreds of people were eating dinner in the food area of the store's basement level when the entire structure collapsed on top of them. The fifth-floor ceiling fell in and caused all the floors underneath it to buckle as well. Fires broke out throughout the structure, some fueled by gasoline from the cars parked in the store's garage. The fires were not put out for several days. Rescue efforts continued for weeks and, amazingly, one survivor was pulled out 16 days after the collapse. Most people were not so lucky–more than 500 died and another 900 suffered severe injuries. Twenty-five people were put on trial for charges relating to the disaster. Lee Joon was convicted of criminal negligence and received a seven-and-a-half-year prison sentence. Jun 29, 1995: U.S. space shuttle docks with Russian space station On this day in 1995, the American space shuttle Atlantis docks with the Russian space station Mir to form the largest man-made satellite ever to orbit the Earth. This historic moment of cooperation between former rival space programs was also the 100th human space mission in American history. At the time, Daniel Goldin, chief of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), called it the beginning of "a new era of friendship and cooperation" between the U.S. and Russia. With millions of viewers watching on television, Atlantis blasted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in eastern Florida on June 27, 1995. Just after 6 a.m. on June 29, Atlantis and its seven crew members approached Mir as both crafts orbited the Earth some 245 miles above Central Asia, near the Russian-Mongolian border. When they spotted the shuttle, the three cosmonauts on Mir broadcast Russian folk songs to Atlantis to welcome them. Over the next two hours, the shuttle's commander, Robert "Hoot" Gibson expertly maneuvered his craft towards the space station. To make the docking, Gibson had to steer the 100-ton shuttle to within three inches of Mir at a closing rate of no more than one foot every 10 seconds. The docking went perfectly and was completed at 8 a.m., just two seconds off the targeted arrival time and using 200 pounds less fuel than had been anticipated. Combined, Atlantis and the 123-ton Mir formed the largest spacecraft ever in orbit. It was only the second time ships from two countries had linked up in space; the first was in June 1975, when an American Apollo capsule and a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft briefly joined in orbit. Once the docking was completed, Gibson and Mir's commander, Vladimir Dezhurov, greeted each other by clasping hands in a victorious celebration of the historic moment. A formal exchange of gifts followed, with the Atlantis crew bringing chocolate, fruit and flowers and the Mir cosmonauts offering traditional Russian welcoming gifts of bread and salt. Atlantis remained docked with Mir for five days before returning to Earth, leaving two fresh Russian cosmonauts on the space station. The three veteran Mir crew members returned with the shuttle, including two Russians and Norman Thagard, a U.S. astronaut who rode a Russian rocket to the space station in mid-March 1995 and spent over 100 days in space, a U.S. endurance record. NASA's Shuttle-Mir program continued for 11 missions and was a crucial step towards the construction of the International Space Station now in orbit. Jun 29, 2001: Boston doctor found guilty of killing wife On June 29, 2001, Boston doctor Dirk Greineder, 60, is found guilty of first-degree murder in the death of Mabel Greineder, 58, his wife of more than 30 years. Dirk Greineder was a distinguished allergist. His wife, known as May, worked for him as a nurse and was pursuing an advanced degree in healthcare. The couple had raised three children, and lived in Wellesley, a tony--and usually crime-free--Boston suburb. Neighbors and friends saw the couple as especially close and devoted to each other. Nearly every day, they walked their German shepherds together in a nearby park. On October 31, 1999, Dirk called 911 from his cell phone to report that his wife had been attacked near a pond at their local park while the two were out for a walk. According to his testimony, he had left his wife to exercise their dog because she had been experiencing back pain, and when he returned to her, he found her beaten body prostrate on the path. She had been nearly decapitated and stabbed in the chest. Police found gloves, a hammer and a pocketknife believed to be used in the murder in a nearby storm drain. In the course of their investigation, it was discovered that the well-respected and accomplished Dirk Greineder had been living a secret life. Using the alias "Thomas Young," he had frequently downloaded internet pornography; rang up substantial phone sex bills; and regularly arranged meetings with prostitutes in hotels and at his home office. In fact, police found that he had contacted a prostitute the day after his wife’s murder. Believing that the doctor had killed his wife in order to more freely pursue his extramarital sexual activities, he was arrested in mid-November 1999. Over the course of the trial, prosecutors described how Dirk had set up a phony company and used it to apply for a corporate credit card in the name "Thomas Young"; that he had frequently solicited group sex and escorts; and that this behavior seemed to become almost obsessive in the week before his wife’s murder. In those seven days, the doctor contacted several prostitutes, had sex with at least one, and sometimes spent more than four hours per day on internet porn sites, in addition to keeping up with a demanding career. Several witnesses testified that May had become increasingly insecure about the marriage, and had become focused on buying new clothes, exercising more often and had even thought about getting a face lift. Prosecutors pointed to the conclusion that May either had discovered her husband’s secret life, or was getting very close, and that Dirk wanted her out of the way. Prosecutors also stressed that witnesses placed Greineder in the moments after the murder emerging from the area where the murder weapons were found hidden instead of heading in the most likely place to find help, the main road. The prosecution also introduced evidence that the doctor had delayed making the 911 call, that the gloves and hammer likely belonged to Dirk and that the blood found at the scene, including on Dirk’s body, was not consistent with his story. Despite some seemingly damning evidence, Dirk Greineder enjoyed strong support from friends and family, including the couple’s three children. The doctor testified about how much he loved his wife and that they were looking forward to their daughter’s upcoming wedding. Although he said he was unsure if his wife knew of his sexual affairs, he intimated that the outside sex may have contributed to the strength of their relationship. The defense contended that the doctor had no reason at all to kill his wife. Despite a mostly circumstantial case against him, Dirk Greineder was found guilty of first-degree murder on June 29, 2001, after a six-week trial and four days of deliberations. Later in the day, Greineder was given the mandatory sentence, life in prison without the possibility of parole. Jun 29, 2003: Katharine Hepburn dies at age 96 On this day in 2003, Katharine Hepburn--a four-time Academy Award winner for Best Actress and one of the greatest screen legends of Hollywood’s golden era--dies of natural causes at the age of 96, at her home in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Hepburn was born into a well-to-do New England family, the daughter of a prominent surgeon, Dr. Thomas Norval Hepburn, and his wife, Katharine Houghton, a suffragist and birth control advocate. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania in 1928 and became a stage actress; her role in the 1932 Broadway production The Warrior’s Husband led to a Hollywood screen test and a contract with RKO studios. In Hepburn’s debut film, A Bill of Divorcement (1932), she starred opposite John Barrymore and was directed by George Cukor, who would become her close friend and helm many of her films (including 1933’s Little Women, 1935’s Sylvia Scarlett, 1938’s Holiday and 1949’s Adam’s Rib). Heralded as a fresh, unconventional beauty and a talented actress, Hepburn won her first Best Actress Oscar for only her third film, Morning Glory (1933). A string of films made with RKO had mixed degrees of success, and Hepburn began earning a reputation as arrogant and self-absorbed on set, though she was always meticulously prepared for her roles. She also refused to play by the rules governing typical Hollywood starlets at the time, appearing publicly in pantsuits and without makeup and refusing to sign autographs or grant interviews. After modest successes with Stage Door (1937) and Bringing Up Baby (1938), Hepburn decided to buy out her contract with RKO, a move that gave her unusual control over her career for that time. Her faltering image was revived by the success of The Philadelphia Story, which had originally been written for Hepburn to play on Broadway and was then adapted into a hit 1940 movie co-starring Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart. Several years later, Hepburn met the actor Spencer Tracy while co-starring with him in Woman of the Year (1942). Though Tracy, a devout Catholic, remained married, the two began a romantic relationship that would last until Tracy’s death nearly three decades later. (Hepburn had divorced her husband of six years, Ludlow Ogden Smith, in 1934.) On-screen, they acted in nine films together, including Adam’s Rib (1949), Pat and Mike (1952) and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967). Tracy died just weeks after shooting was completed on the last film, for which Hepburn would win her second Best Actress Oscar. Hepburn was awarded her third Oscar for her starring turn in A Lion in Winter (1968). She continued to appear in films and on television (including an Emmy-winning performance in 1976’s Love Among the Ruins) throughout the next three decades, winning a fourth Best Actress statuette for 1981’s On Golden Pond. Nominated for 12 Academy Awards in her lifetime (a record that would stand until 2003, when Meryl Streep received her 13th nomination), Hepburn never attended the awards show to collect her honors in person. In 1986, she broke her longtime silence about her relationship with Tracy (his widow had died in 1983) in a televised tribute to the actor. She read aloud a poignant letter she had written to him about his drinking, and about their last years together. She later included the letter in her best-selling 1991 autobiography Me: Stories of My Life. In her final screen appearance, in 1994’s Love Affair (a remake of the classic 1939 film), Hepburn appeared frail but composed as ever in her portrayal of the aristocratic aunt of Warren Beatty’s character. In 1999, the American Film Institute (AFI) named Hepburn as the greatest female actress in the history of American cinema. When she died on June 29, 2003, the lights on Broadway were dimmed for an hour to mark the passing of one of entertainment’s brightest stars.
30 June Events 350 – Roman usurper Nepotianus, of the Constantinian dynasty, is defeated and killed by troops of the usurper Magnentius, in Rome. 1422 – Battle of Arbedo between the duke of Milan and the Swiss cantons. 1520 – Spanish conquistadors led by Hernán Cortés fight their way out of Tenochtitlan. 1521 – Spanish forces defeat a combined French and Navarrese army at the Battle of Noáin during the Spanish conquest of Iberian Navarre. 1559 – King Henry II of France is mortally wounded in a jousting match against Gabriel de Montgomery. 1651 – The Deluge: Khmelnytsky Uprising – the Battle of Beresteczko ends with a Polish victory. 1688 – The Immortal Seven issue the Invitation to William (continuing the English rebellion from Rome), which would culminate in the Glorious Revolution. 1758 – Seven Years' War: The Battle of Domstadtl takes place. 1794 – Native American forces under Blue Jacket attack Fort Recovery. 1805 – The U.S. Congress organizes the Michigan Territory. 1859 – French acrobat Charles Blondin crosses Niagara Falls on a tightrope. 1860 – The 1860 Oxford evolution debate at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History takes place. 1864 – U.S. President Abraham Lincoln grants Yosemite Valley to California for "public use, resort and recreation". 1882 – Charles J. Guiteau is hanged in Washington, D.C. for the assassination of U.S. President James Garfield. 1886 – The first transcontinental train trip across Canada departs from Montreal. It arrives in Port Moody, British Columbia on July 4. 1892 – The Homestead Strike begins near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 1905 – Albert Einstein publishes the article On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies, in which he introduces special relativity. 1906 – The United States Congress passes the Meat Inspection Act and Pure Food and Drug Act. 1908 – The Tunguska event occurs in remote Siberia. 1912 – The Regina Cyclone hits Regina, Saskatchewan, killing 28. It remains Canada's deadliest tornado event. 1917 – World War I: Greece declares war on the Central Powers. 1921 – U.S. President Warren G. Harding appoints former President William Howard Taft Chief Justice of the United States. 1922 – In Washington D.C., U.S. Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes and Dominican Ambassador Francisco J. Peynado sign the Hughes-Peynado agreement, which ends the United States occupation of the Dominican Republic. 1934 – The Night of the Long Knives, Adolf Hitler's violent purge of his political rivals in Germany, takes place. 1935 – The Senegalese Socialist Party holds its first congress. 1936 – Emperor Haile Selassie of Abyssinia appeals for aid to the League of Nations against Italy's invasion of his country. 1937 – The world's first emergency telephone number, 999, is introduced in London 1944 – World War II: The Battle of Cherbourg ends with the fall of the strategically valuable port to American forces. 1953 – The first Chevrolet Corvette rolls off the assembly line in Flint, Michigan. 1956 – A TWA Super Constellation and a United Airlines DC-7 collide above the Grand Canyon in Arizona and crash, killing all 128 on board both planes. It is the worst-ever aviation disaster at that point in time. 1959 – A United States Air Force F-100 Super Sabre from Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, crashes into a nearby elementary school, killing 11 students plus six residents from the local neighborhood. 1960 – Congo gains independence from Belgium. 1963 – Ciaculli massacre: a car bomb, intended for Mafia boss Salvatore Greco, kills seven police officers and military personnel near Palermo. 1966 – The National Organization for Women, the United States' largest feminist organization, is founded. 1968 – Pope Paul VI issues the Credo of the People of God. 1969 – Nigeria bans Red Cross aid to Biafra. 1971 – The crew of the Soviet Soyuz 11 spacecraft are killed when their air supply escapes through a faulty valve. 1971 – Ohio ratifies the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, reducing the voting age to 18, thereby putting the amendment into effect. 1972 – The first leap second is added to the UTC time system. 1974 – The Baltimore municipal strike of 1974 begins. 1977 – The Southeast Asia Treaty Organization disbands. 1985 – Thirty-nine American hostages from the hijacked TWA Flight 847 are freed in Beirut after being held for 17 days. 1986 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules in Bowers v. Hardwick that states can outlaw homosexual acts between consenting adults. 1987 – The Royal Canadian Mint introduces the $1 coin, known as the Loonie. 1990 – East Germany and West Germany merge their economies. 1991 – Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, starts "The Great Gage Park Decency Drive" picketing the park, starting their notorious picketing campaign that would later include funerals of AIDS victims and fallen American military. 1997 – The United Kingdom transfers sovereignty over Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China. 1998 – Philippine Vice President Joseph Estrada is sworn in as the 13th President of the Philippines. B
Jun 30, 1520: Spanish retreat from Aztec capital Faced with an Aztec revolt against their rule, forces under the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes fight their way out of Tenochtitlan at heavy cost. Known to the Spanish as La Noche Triste, or "the Night of Sadness," many soldiers drowned in Lake Texcoco when the vessel carrying them and Aztec treasures hoarded by CortÝs sank. Montezuma II, the Aztec emperor who had become merely a subject of Cortes in the previous year, was also killed during the struggle; by the Aztecs or the Spanish, it is not known. Tenochtitlan was founded in 1325 A.D. by a wandering tribe of hunters and gatherers on islands in Lake Texcoco, near the present site of Mexico City. In only one century, this civilization grew into the Aztec Empire, due largely to its advanced system of agriculture. The empire came to dominate central Mexico and by the ascendance of Montezuma II in 1502 had reached its greatest extent, reaching as far south as perhaps modern-day Nicaragua. At the time, the empire was held together primarily by Aztec military strength, and Montezuma II set about establishing a bureaucracy, creating provinces that would pay tribute to the imperial capital of Tenochtitlan. The conquered peoples resented the Aztec demands for tribute and victims for the religious sacrifices, but the Aztec military kept rebellion at bay. Meanwhile, Hernan Cortes, a young Spanish-born noble, came to Hispaniola in the West Indies in 1504. In 1511, he sailed with Diego Velazquez to conquer Cuba and twice was elected mayor of Santiago, the capital of Hispaniola. In 1518, he was appointed captain general of a new Spanish expedition to the American mainland. Velazquez, the governor of Cuba, later rescinded the order, and Cortes sailed without permission. He visited the coast of Yucatan and in March 1519 landed at Tabasco in Mexico's Bay of Campeche with 500 soldiers, 100 sailors, and 16 horses. There, he won over the local Indians and was given a female slave, Malinche--baptized Marina--who became his mistress and later bore him a son. She knew both Maya and Aztec and served as an interpreter. The expedition then proceeded up the Mexican coast, where Cortes founded Veracruz, mainly for the purpose of having himself elected captain general by the colony, thus shaking off the authority of Velazquez and making him responsible only to King Charles V of Spain. At Veracruz, Cortes trained his army and then burned his ships to ensure loyalty to his plans for conquest. Having learned of political strife in the Aztec Empire, Cortes led his force into the Mexican interior. On the way to Tenochtitlan, he clashed with local Indians, but many of these peoples, including the nation of Tlaxcala, became his allies after learning of his plan to conquer their hated Aztec rulers. Hearing of the approach of Cortes, with his frightful horses and sophisticated weapons, Montezuma II tried to buy him off, but Cortes would not be dissuaded. On November 8, 1519, the Spaniards and their 1,000 Tlaxcaltec warriors were allowed to enter Tenochtitlan unopposed. Montezuma suspected them to be divine envoys of the god Quetzalcoatl, who was prophesied to return from the east in a "One Reed" year, which 1519 was on the Aztec calendar. The Spaniards were greeted with great honor, and Cortes seized the opportunity, taking Montezuma hostage so that he might govern the empire through him. His mistress, Marina, was a great help in this endeavor and succeeded in convincing Montezuma to cooperate fully. In the spring of 1520, Cortes learned of the arrival of a Spanish force from Cuba, led by Panfilo Narvaez and sent by Velazquez to deprive Cortes of his command. Cortes led his army out of Tenochtitlan to meet them, leaving behind a garrison of 80 Spaniards and a few hundred Tlaxcaltecs to govern the city. Cortes defeated Narvaez and enlisted Narvaez' army into his own. When he returned to Tenochtitlan in June, he found the garrison under siege from the Aztecs, who had rebelled after the subordinate that Cortes left in command of the city massacred several Aztec chiefs, and the population on the brink of revolt. On June 30, under pressure and lacking food, Cortes and his men fled the capital at night. In the fighting that ensued, Montezuma was killed--in Aztec reports by the Spaniards, and in Spanish reports by an Aztec mob bitter at Montezuma's subservience to Spanish rule. He was succeeded as emperor by his brother, Cuitlahuac. During the Spaniards' retreat, they defeated a large Aztec army at Otumba and then rejoined their Tlaxcaltec allies. In May 1521, Cortes returned to Tenochtitlan, and after a three-month siege the city fell. This victory marked the fall of the Aztec empire. Cuauhtemoc, Cuitlahuac's successor as emperor, was taken prisoner and later executed, and Cortes became the ruler of vast Mexican empire. The Spanish conquistador led an expedition to Honduras in 1524 and in 1528 returned to Spain to see the king. Charles made him Marques del Valle but refused to name him governor because of his quarrels with Velazquez and others. In 1530, he returned to Mexico, now known as New Spain, and found the country in disarray. After restoring some order, he retired to his estate south of Mexico City and sent out maritime expeditions from the Pacific coast. In 1540, he returned to Spain and was neglected by the court. He died in 1547. Jun 30, 1775: Congress impugns Parliament and adopts Articles of War On this day in 1775, the Continental Congress drafts its rationale for taking up arms against Great Britain in the Articles of War. In the Articles of War, written one year before the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, Congress referred to "his Majesty's most faithful subjects in these Colonies" and laid the blame for colonial discontent not on King George III, but on "attempts of the British Ministry, to carry into execution, by force of arms, several unconstitutional and oppressive acts of the British parliaments for laying taxes in America." By phrasing their discontent this way, Congress attempted to notify the king that American colonists were unhappy with parliamentary policy. By July 1776, the Declaration of Independence proclaimed something very different: "The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States." Congress language is critical to understanding the seismic shift that had occurred in American thought in just 12 months. Indeed, Congress insisted that Thomas Jefferson remove any language from the declaration that implicated the people of Great Britain or their elected representatives in Parliament. The fundamental grounds upon which Americans were taking up arms had shifted. The militia that had fired upon Redcoats at Lexington and Concord had been angry with Parliament, not the king, who they still trusted to desire only good for all of his subjects around the globe. This belief changed after King George refused to so much as receive the so-called Olive Branch Petition, sent to him by Congress in July 1775 in a final attempt to make him aware of the colonists grievances. Patriots had hoped that Parliament had curtailed colonial rights without the king's full knowledge, and that the petition would cause him to come to his subjects' defense. When George III refused to read the petition, Patriots realized that Parliament was acting with royal knowledge and support. The king became the central focus of the Americans patriotic rage when English-born radical Thomas Paine published his blistering attack on the monarchy, Common Sense, in January 1776. Jun 30, 1812: Madison makes urgent call to commission more officers to fight the British On this day in 1812, President James Madison delivers a special message calling for emergency commissions for new military officers 12 days after declaring war on Britain. Even though the United States had asserted its independence from Britain three decades earlier, in the 1790s the English Navy started seizing American ships in French ports and "impressing" (involuntarily conscripting) American sailors to help the British fight their naval war against France. Successive American presidents including George Washington, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, in an attempt to maintain diplomatic relations with England and secure free access to Atlantic shipping lanes, failed to successfully negotiate an end to British impressment and the seizure of American merchant vessels. As a result, relations between the U.S. and Britain deteriorated. Jefferson's 1807 embargo of international trade also failed, resulting in severe economic losses for American merchants. Meanwhile, British encroachment on the northern U.S. border with Canada increased calls among Americans for war. On June 18, 1812, Madison asked Congress to declare war on Britain–the second time the young nation would battle its former colonial master in 35 years. At the time, the overstretched, all-volunteer U.S. Army and Navy paled in comparison to the numerically and materially superior British forces. Although American men signed up to fight Britain, there was a sore lack of qualified officers to lead the troops. Disastrous campaigns in Canada against the British in the summer of 1812 prompted Madison to urge Congress to increase emergency commissions of military officers, adjutants, quartermasters, inspectors, paymasters and engineers. The War of 1812 was often referred to as "Madison's War"--particularly when things were not going well--or the "Second War of Independence." Among the troops to distinguish themselves in the War of 1812 were two future presidents: William Henry Harrison and Andrew Jackson. The successful end to the war in 1815 boosted Madison's popularity and increased Americans' confidence in their ability to fight off foreign aggressors. Jun 30, 1859: Daredevil crosses Niagara Falls on tightrope Jean-Francois Gravelet, a Frenchman known professionally as Emile Blondin, becomes the first daredevil to walk across Niagara Falls on a tightrope. The feat, which was performed 160 feet above the Niagara gorge just down river from the Falls, was witnessed by some 5,000 spectators. Wearing pink tights and a yellow tunic, Blondin crossed a cable about two inches in diameter and 1,100-feet long with only a balancing pole to protect him from plunging into the dangerous rapids below. It was the first in a series of famous Niagara tightrope walks performed by "The Great Blondin" from 1859 to 1860. These "ascensions," as he advertised them, always had different theatrical variations, including doing tightrope walks blindfolded, in a sack, with his manager on his back, sitting down midway to cook an omelet, and pushing a wheelbarrow across while dressed as an ape. In 1861, he performed at the Crystal Palace in London, turning somersaults on stilts on a rope stretched 170 feet above the ground. He died in 1897. Jun 30, 1862: Fighting continues in the Seven Days' Battles The Seven Days' Battles continue at Glendale (White Oak Swamp), Virginia, as Robert E. Lee has a chance to deal a decisive blow against George B. McClellan's Army of the Potomac. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia had already won the Seven Days' Battles, but the Confederates' attempt to rout McClellan cost many Southern casualties. The Seven Days' Battles were the climax of McClellan's Peninsular campaign in Virginia. For two months, the Union army sailed down Chesapeake Bay and then inched up the James Peninsula. In late June, the two forces began a series of clashes in which McClellan became unnerved and began to retreat to his base at Harrison's Landing on the James River. Lee hounded him on the retreat. On June 30, Lee plotted a complex attack on the Yankees as they backed down the peninsula. He hoped to hit the front, flank, and rear of the Union army to create confusion and jam the escape routes. Those attacks did not succeed, as they required precise timing. Lee's own generals were confused, the attacks developed slowly, and they made only temporary ruptures in the Federal lines. Most disappointing for Lee was the performance of General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson. Jackson was coming off a brilliant campaign in the Shenandoah Valley, but he showed little of his skill during the Seven Days' Battles. His corps halted at the edge of White Oak Swamp, and he focused his attention on taking a bridge from the Yankees. His officers located fords that would have allowed his men to bypass the bottleneck, but Jackson stayed put. This allowed the Union to move troops from Jackson's sector of the battlefield to halt a Confederate attack in another area. Lee's failure at Glendale permitted McClellan's army to fall back to higher, more defensible locations. The next day, July 1, Lee assaulted Malvern Hill and his army suffered tremendous casualties in the face of a withering Union artillery barrage. Jun 30, 1876: Soldiers are evacuated from the Little Big Horn by steamboat After a slow two-day march, the wounded soldiers from the Battle of the Little Big Horn reach the steamboat Far West. The Far West had been leased by the U.S. Army for the duration of the 1876 campaign against the hostile Sioux and Cheyenne Indians of the Northern Plains. Under the command of the skilled civilian Captain Grant Marsh, the 190-foot vessel was ideal for navigating the shallow waters of the Upper Missouri River system. The boat drew only 20 inches of water when fully laden and Marsh managed to steam up the shallow Big Horn River in southern Montana in June 1876. There, the boat became a headquarters for the army's planned attack on a village of Sioux and Cheyenne they believed were camping on the nearby Little Big Horn River. On June 28, Captain Grant and several other men were fishing about a mile from the boat when a young Indian on horseback approached. "He wore an exceedingly dejected countenance," one man later wrote. By signing and drawing on the ground, the Indian managed to convey that there had been a battle but the men did not understand its outcome. In fact, the Indian was Curley, one of Lieutenant Colonel George Custer's Crow scouts. Three days earlier, he had been the last man to see Custer and his 7th Cavalry battalion before they were wiped out during the Battle of the Little Big Horn. The following day, Grant received a dispatch from General Terry, who had found Custer's destroyed battalion and the surviving soldiers of the 7th Cavalry. Terry ordered Grant to prepare to evacuate the wounded soldiers. Slowed by the burden of carrying the wounded men, Terry's force did not arrive until June 30. Grant immediately received the 54 wounded soldiers and sped downstream as quickly as possible. With the Far West draped in black and flying her flag at half-mast, Grant delivered the wounded to Fort Abraham Lincoln near Bismarck, North Dakota, at 11:00 p.m. on July 5. The fast and relatively comfortable transport of the wounded by steam power undoubtedly saved numerous lives. Yet, Grant was also the bearer of bad news. From Fort Abraham Lincoln, General Terry's report of the disaster was telegraphed all over the country. Soon the entire nation learned that General Custer and more than 200 men had been killed along the Little Big Horn River. Jun 30, 1900: Fire breaks out at New Jersey pier On this day in 1900, four German boats burn at the docks in Hoboken, New Jersey, killing more than 300 people. The fire was so large that it could be seen by nearly every person in the New York City area. William Northmaid was working as the afternoon watchman on Pier 3 in Hoboken when he spotted a fire just before 4 p.m. The old wooden pier was at serious risk for fire and the combination of strong winds and the presence of wooden fuel-filled cargo sheds made it spread very rapidly. Before the Hoboken fire department could respond, the ship Saale, which had been docked at the pier, caught fire and drifted out into the Hudson River. Many of the ship's workers did not know how to swim and drowned. The ship Bremen was next to catch fire. Nettie Tice, one of the tugboats sent to take the big ships off the fiery dock, was able to pick up more than 100 survivors of the Bremen. Other tugs assisted the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, the flagship of the North German Lloyd shipping company. Although the big ship had weekend tourists aboard, its captain kept the crew from panicking, got everyone off safely and had tugboats take the ship to the Manhattan side of the Hudson, away from the danger. Meanwhile, workers futilely attempted to release another ship, the Main, from the pier. Before they were able to, it too caught fire. Forty-four crew members perished. Many died because portholes were built so small that people could not escape through them. Would-be rescuers could only watch as victims perished in the smoke and flames. Eventually the Main broke loose from the pier and both the Bremen and Main drifted to the Weehawken flats, where they burned together in the river. Later, 15 crew members were rescued from the Main. They had managed to save themselves by staying in an empty coal bunker on the ship that protected them from the raging fire. There was so much flaming debris in the Hudson that 27 boats in all caught fire during the evening. The pier fire also spread to the shore. The Hoboken Warehouse and Campbell's Store burned to the ground. Three other piers also burned. By the time all the fires had been put out, somewhere between 325 and 400 people had died and property owners had suffered $4.5 million in insurable damages, which is equivalent to nearly $100 million in today's money. Many people were missing, so crews set off dynamite in hopes that the explosions might help bodies stuck in the river floor to surface. The piers were rebuilt using steel.
30 June Births 1286 – John de Warenne, 7th Earl of Surrey, English politician (d. 1347) 1470 – Charles VIII of France, King of France (d. 1498) 1503 – John Frederick I, Elector of Saxony (d. 1554) 1588 – Giovanni Maria Sabino, Italian organist, composer, and educator (d. 1649) 1641 – Meinhardt Schomberg, 3rd Duke of Schomberg, German-English general (d. 1719) 1685 – John Gay, English poet and playwright (d. 1732) 1755 – Paul François Jean Nicolas, vicomte de Barras, French politician (d. 1829) 1789 – Horace Vernet, French painter (d. 1863) 1801 – Frédéric Bastiat, French economist (d. 1850) 1803 – Thomas Lovell Beddoes, English poet, playwright, and physician (d. 1849) 1807 – Friedrich Theodor Vischer, German author, poet, and playwright (d.1887) 1817 – Joseph Dalton Hooker, English botanist (d. 1911) 1823 – Dinshaw Maneckji Petit, Indian businessman (d. 1901) 1843 – Ernest Mason Satow, English diplomat (d. 1929) 1864 – Frederick Bligh Bond, English architect and archaeologist (d. 1945) 1880 – Franz Kröwerath, German rower (d. 1945) 1883 – Johan Olin, Finnish wrestler (d. 1928) 1884 – Georges Duhamel, French author (d. 1966) 1890 – Paul Boffa, Maltese politician, 5th Prime Minister of Malta (d. 1962) 1891 – Man Mountain Dean, American wrestler (d. 1953) 1891 – Ed Lewis, American wrestler (d. 1966) 1892 – Pierre Blanchar, French actor (d. 1963) 1892 – Bo Carter, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (Mississippi Sheiks) (d. 1962) 1892 – Oswald Pohl, German SS officer (d. 1951) 1893 – Walter Ulbricht, German politician (d. 1973) 1899 – Madge Bellamy, American actress (d. 1990) 1899 – Harry Shields, American clarinet player (d. 1971) 1906 – Ralph Allen, English footballer (d. 1981) 1906 – Anthony Mann, American actor and director (d. 1967) 1907 – Roman Shukhevych, Ukrainian general and politician (d. 1950) 1908 – Winston Graham, English author (d. 2003) 1911 – Czesław Miłosz, Polish poet and author, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2004) 1912 – Ludwig Bölkow, German engineer (d. 2003) 1912 – Dan Reeves, American businessman (d. 1971) 1913 – Alfonso López Michelsen, Colombian lawyer and politician, 24th President of Colombia (d. 2007) 1913 – Harry Wismer, American sportscaster (d. 1967) 1914 – Francisco da Costa Gomes, Portuguese general and politician, 15th President of Portugal (d. 2001) 1914 – Allan Houser, American sculptor and painter (d. 1994) 1914 – Bill Monti, Australian rugby player (d. 1977) 1917 – Susan Hayward, American actress and singer (d. 1975) 1917 – Lena Horne, American actress, singer, and dancer (d. 2010) 1919 – Ed Yost, American inventor, invented the hot air balloon (d. 2007) 1925 – Fred Schaus, American basketball player and coach (d. 2010) 1926 – Paul Berg, American biochemist, Nobel Prize laureate 1927 – Walter G. Church, Sr., American politician (d. 2012) 1927 – James Goldman, American screenwriter and playwright (d. 1998) 1927 – Bob Willoughby, American photographer (d. 2009) 1930 – Thomas Sowell, American economist, philosopher, and author 1931 – Yo-Yo Davalillo, Venezuelan baseball player and manager (d. 2013) 1931 – Andrew Hill, American pianist and composer (d. 2007) 1931 – James Loughran, Scottish conductor 1933 – Barry Hines, English writer 1933 – Lea Massari, Italian actress 1933 – M. J. K. Smith, English cricketer 1933 – Orval Tessier, Canadian ice hockey player and coach 1934 – Harry Blackstone, Jr., American magician (d. 1997) 1935 – John Harlin, American pilot and mountaineer (d. 1966) 1936 – Assia Djebar, Algerian author and director 1936 – Nancy Dussault, American actress and singer 1936 – Tony Musante, American actor and screenwriter (d. 2013) 1936 – Dave Van Ronk, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2002) 1937 – Michael von Biel, German cellist and composer 1938 – Apostolos Nikolaidis, Greek singer (d. 1999) 1939 – Tunku Annuar, Malaysian son of Badlishah of Kedah (d. 2014) 1939 – Tony Hatch, English pianist, composer, and producer 1939 – José Emilio Pacheco, Mexican poet and author (d. 2014) 1940 – Mark Spoelstra, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (d. 2007) 1941 – Peter Pollock, South African cricketer and author 1941 – Otto Sander, German actor (d. 2013) 1942 – Robert Ballard, American lieutenant and oceanographer 1942 – Ron Harris, Canadian ice hockey player 1942 – Dennis Rogan, Irish politician 1943 – Florence Ballard, American singer (The Supremes) (d. 1976) 1943 – Saeed Akhtar Mirza, Indian director and screenwriter 1943 – Eddie Rambeau, American singer-songwriter, and actor 1943 – Ahmed Sofa, Bangladeshi author, poet, and critic (d. 2001) 1944 – Terry Funk, American wrestler and actor 1944 – Raymond Moody, American parapsychologist and author 1944 – Glenn Shorrock, English-Australian singer-songwriter (Little River Band, The Twilights, Axiom, Esperanto, and Birtles Shorrock Goble) 1944 – Ron Swoboda, American baseball player and sportscaster 1945 – Christopher Lloyd, British art historian 1945 – Sean Scully, Irish painter 1947 – Barry Bremen, American businessman (d. 2011) 1947 – David Meara, British Anglican prelate 1948 – Vilen Künnapu, Estonian architect 1948 – Murray McLauchlan, Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist 1949 – Uwe Kliemann, German footballer, coach, and manager 1949 – Andy Scott, Welsh singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (Sweet) 1950 – Leonard Whiting, English actor 1951 – Stanley Clarke, American bass player and composer (Return to Forever, Animal Logic, and SMV) 1952 – Athanassios S. Fokas, Greek mathematician 1952 – David Garrison, American actor 1953 – Jane Denton, British nurse and midwife 1953 – Lin Feng-jiao, Taiwanese actress 1953 – Hal Lindes, American-English singer-songwriter and guitarist (Dire Straits) 1954 – Stephen Barlow, English conductor 1954 – Pierre Charles, Dominican politician, 5th Prime Minister of Dominica (d. 2004) 1954 – Serzh Sargsyan, Armenian politician, 3rd President of Armenia 1954 – Wayne Swan, Australian politician, 14th Deputy Prime Minister of Australia 1955 – David Alan Grier, American actor, screenwriter, and producer 1955 – Brian Vollmer, Canadian singer (Helix) 1956 – David Lidington, English politician 1957 – Bud Black, American baseball player and manager 1957 – Sterling Marlin, American race car driver 1957 – Rich Vos, American comedian 1958 – Tommy Keene, American singer-songwriter and guitarist 1958 – Lina Nikolakopoulou, Greek composer 1958 – Wilhelm Reisinger, German footballer 1958 – Esa-Pekka Salonen, Finnish conductor and composer 1959 – Vincent D'Onofrio, American actor, singer, director, producer, and screenwriter 1959 – Daniel Goldhagen, American political scientist and author 1959 – Brendan Perry, English singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (Dead Can Dance and The Scavengers) 1959 – Sakis Tsiolis, Greek footballer and manager 1959 – Sandip Verma, Indian-born British politician 1960 – Murray Cook, Australian singer-songwriter and guitarist (The Wiggles and Bang Shang a Lang) 1960 – David Headley, American-Pakistani terrorist 1960 – Jack McConnell, Scottish politician, 3rd First Minister of Scotland 1962 – Tony Fernández, Dominican baseball player 1962 – Deirdre Lovejoy, American actress 1962 – Julianne Regan, English singer-songwriter and guitarist (All About Eve) 1963 – Rupert Graves, English actor 1963 – Yngwie Malmsteen, Swedish singer-songwriter, musician, and producer (Steeler and Alcatrazz) 1964 – Alexandra, Countess of Frederiksborg 1964 – Mark Waters, American director and producer 1965 – Steve Duchesne, Canadian-American ice hockey player and coach 1965 – Anna Levandi, Russian figure skater 1965 – Gary Pallister, English footballer and sportscaster 1965 – Mitch Richmond, American basketball player 1966 – Cheryl Bernard, Canadian curler 1966 – Marton Csokas, New Zealand actor 1966 – Wendy Davis, American actress 1966 – Mike Tyson, American boxer and actor 1967 – David Busst, English footballer and manager 1967 – Nitin Ganatra, Kenyan born British actor 1968 – Phil Anselmo, American singer-songwriter and producer (Pantera, Arson Anthem, Down, and Superjoint Ritual) 1969 – Sanath Jayasuriya, Sri Lankan cricketer and politician 1969 – Uta Rohländer, German sprinter 1969 – Sébastien Rose, Canadian director and screenwriter 1970 – Brian Bloom, American actor and screenwriter 1970 – Antonio Chimenti, Italian footballer 1970 – Mark Grudzielanek, American baseball player 1971 – Megan Fahlenbock, Canadian actress 1971 – Anette Michel, Mexican actress 1971 – Monica Potter, American actress 1972 – Sandra Cam, Belgian swimmer 1972 – James Martin, English chef 1973 – Robert Bales, American soldier 1973 – Chan Ho Park, South Korean baseball player 1973 – Frank Rost, German footballer and manager 1973 – Noam Zylberman, Israeli-Canadian actor 1974 – Tony Rock, American comedian, actor, and screenwriter 1975 – James Bannatyne, New Zealand footballer 1975 – Ralf Schumacher, German race car driver 1975 – Rami Shaaban, Swedish-Egyptian footballer 1977 – Mark van Gisbergen, New Zealand-English rugby player 1977 – Justo Villar, Paraguayan footballer 1978 – Ben Cousins, Australian footballer 1978 – Claudio Rivalta, Italian footballer 1979 – Matisyahu, American rapper and actor 1979 – Sylvain Chavanel, French cyclist 1979 – Rick Gonzalez, American actor 1979 – Allari Naresh, Indian actor 1979 – Faisal Shahzad, Pakistani-American terrorist, attempted the Times Square bombing 1980 – Rade Prica, Swedish footballer 1980 – Seyi Olofinjana, Nigerian footballer 1981 – Can Artam, Turkish race car driver 1981 – Tom Burke, English actor 1981 – Matt Kirk, Canadian football player 1981 – Karolina Sadalska, Polish canoe racer 1981 – Ben Utecht, American football player 1982 – Willam Belli, American drag queen performer and singer (DWV) 1982 – Lizzy Caplan, American actress 1982 – Ignacio Carrasco, Mexican footballer 1982 – Andy Knowles, English drummer (Franz Ferdinand and Skuta) 1982 – Mitch Maier, American baseball player 1982 – Delwyn Young, American baseball player 1983 – Marcus Burghardt, German cyclist 1983 – Cheryl Cole, English singer-songwriter, dancer, and model (Girls Aloud) 1983 – Marlin Jackson, American football player 1983 – Katherine Ryan, Canadian comedienne 1983 – Patrick Wolf, English singer-songwriter 1984 – Miles Austin, American football player 1984 – Gabriel Badilla, Costa Rican footballer 1984 – Fantasia Barrino, American singer and actress 1985 – Trevor Ariza, American basketball player 1985 – Rafał Blechacz, Polish pianist 1985 – Michael Phelps, American swimmer 1985 – Cody Rhodes, American wrestler and actor 1985 – Fabiana Vallejos, Argentinian footballer 1986 – Alicia Fox, American wrestler and model 1986 – Fredy Guarín, Colombian footballer 1986 – Jamai Loman, Dutch singer and actor 1986 – Nicola Pozzi, Italian footballer 1986 – Hugh Sheridan, Australian actor and singer 1986 – Allegra Versace, Italian-American businesswoman 1987 – Ryan Cook, American baseball player 1987 – Andrew Hedgman, New Zealand runner 1988 – Jack Douglass, American comedian and actor 1988 – Jeff Kobernus, American baseball player 1988 – Sean Marquette, American actor 1989 – Steffen Liebig, German rugby player 1989 – David Myers, Australian footballer 1989 – Miguel Vítor, Portuguese footballer 1990 – Petra Krejsová, Czech tennis player 1991 – Kaho, Japanese actress 1991 – David Witts, English actor 1992 – Holliston Coleman, American actress 1992 – Lamb Gaede, American singer (Prussian Blue) 1992 – Lynx Gaede, American singer (Prussian Blue) 1994 – Rhys Jones, Welsh sprinter 1995 – Alexandra Kiick, American tennis player 1997 – Iryna Shymanovich, Belarusian tennis player D
Jun 30, 1914: European powers maintain focus despite killings in Sarajevo In an editorial published on the final day of June 1914, two days after the killing of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary and his wife by a Serbian nationalist during an official appearance in Sarajevo, Bosnia, the London Times urges a continued focus on domestic affairs. Although what happened in Sarajevo obviously filled "the first place in the public mind," acknowledged the Times, and the outcome of the investigation into the killing would no doubt "occupy the attention of all students of European politics," it was imperative that Britons keep their priorities straight, because "our own affairs must be addressed." At the time, the United Kingdom was threatened by the possible outbreak of civil war over the future status of Ireland; this presumably was the principal "affair" to which the Times was referring. In Britain, as in many of the European capitals, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand was at first viewed in a less alarmist light than might be assumed given the enormity of the war that the event would later precipitate. The archduke had not been widely liked, within his own country or without, and as the British ambassador to Italy reported to his government in London: "It is obvious that people have generally regarded the elimination of the Archduke as almost providential." In Paris on June 30, at the first cabinet meeting since the events in Sarajevo, President Raymond Poincare's biographer reported later that the killings were "hardly mentioned." The attention of the French public, meanwhile, was riveted on the scandalous case of Madame Caillaux, a politician's wife who had murdered the editor of a right-wing newspaper after he threatened to publish damaging material about her husband. Even in Vienna, the archduke's own capital city, Franz Ferdinand's death seemed to arouse little strong feeling from the public. As the Austrian government and military leadership hurried to obtain assurances of German support if the Austrian pressure on Serbia over the assassinations led to war with Serbia and its powerful ally, Russia, the reaction among the Austrian population was mild, almost indifferent. As historian Z.A.B. Zeman later wrote, "the event almost failed to make any impression whatsoever. On Sunday and Monday [June 28 and 29], the crowds in Vienna listened to music and drank wine?as if nothing had happened." Jun 30, 1934: Night of the Long Knives In Germany, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler orders a bloody purge of his own political party, assassinating hundreds of Nazis whom he believed had the potential to become political enemies in the future. The leadership of the Nazi Storm Troopers (SA), whose four million members had helped bring Hitler to power in the early 1930s, was especially targeted. Hitler feared that some of his followers had taken his early "National Socialism" propaganda too seriously and thus might compromise his plan to suppress workers' rights in exchange for German industry making the country war-ready. In the early 1920s, the ranks of Hitler's Nazi Party swelled with resentful Germans who sympathized with the party's bitter hatred of Germany's democratic government, leftist politics, and Jews. In November 1923, after the German government resumed the payment of war reparations to Britain and France, the Nazis launched the "Beer Hall Putsch"--their first attempt at seizing the German government by force. Hitler hoped that his nationalist revolution in Bavaria would spread to the dissatisfied German army, which in turn would bring down the government in Berlin. However, the uprising was immediately suppressed, and Hitler was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison for high treason. Sent to Landsberg jail, he spent his time dictating his autobiography, Mein Kampf, and working on his oratorical skills. After nine months in prison, political pressure from supporters of the Nazi Party forced his release. During the next few years, Hitler and the other leading Nazis reorganized their party as a fanatical mass movement that was able to gain a majority in the German parliament--the Reichstag--by legal means in 1932. In the same year, President Paul von Hindenburg defeated a presidential bid by Hitler, but in January 1933 he appointed Hitler chancellor, hoping that the powerful Nazi leader could be brought to heel as a member of the president's cabinet. However, Hindenburg underestimated Hitler's political audacity, and one of the new chancellor's first acts was to use the burning of the Reichstag building as a pretext for calling general elections. The police, under Nazi Hermann Goering, suppressed much of the party's opposition before the election, and the Nazis won a bare majority. Shortly after, Hitler took on absolute power through the Enabling Acts. In 1934, Hindenburg died, and the last remnants of Germany's democratic government were dismantled, leaving Hitler the sole master of a nation intent on war and genocide. Jun 30, 1936: Gone with the Wind published Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, one of the best-selling novels of all time and the basis for a blockbuster 1939 movie, is published on this day in 1936. In 1926, Mitchell was forced to quit her job as a reporter at the Atlanta Journal to recover from a series of physical injuries. With too much time on her hands, Mitchell soon grew restless. Working on a Remington typewriter, a gift from her second husband, John R. Marsh, in their cramped one-bedroom apartment, Mitchell began telling the story of an Atlanta belle named Pansy O'Hara. In tracing Pansy's tumultuous life from the antebellum South through the Civil War and into the Reconstruction era, Mitchell drew on the tales she had heard from her parents and other relatives, as well as from Confederate war veterans she had met as a young girl. While she was extremely secretive about her work, Mitchell eventually gave the manuscript to Harold Latham, an editor from New York's MacMillan Publishing. Latham encouraged Mitchell to complete the novel, with one important change: the heroine's name. Mitchell agreed to change it to Scarlett, now one of the most memorable names in the history of literature. Published in 1936, Gone with the Wind caused a sensation in Atlanta and went on to sell millions of copies in the United States and throughout the world. While the book drew some criticism for its romanticized view of the Old South and its slaveholding elite, its epic tale of war, passion and loss captivated readers far and wide. By the time Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937, a movie project was already in the works. The film was produced by Hollywood giant David O. Selznick, who paid Mitchell a record-high $50,000 for the film rights to her book. After testing hundreds of unknowns and big-name stars to play Scarlett, Selznick hired British actress Vivien Leigh days after filming began. Clark Gable was also on board as Rhett Butler, Scarlett's dashing love interest. Plagued with problems on set, Gone with the Wind nonetheless became one of the highest-grossing and most acclaimed movies of all time, breaking box office records and winning nine Academy Awards out of 13 nominations. Though she didn't take part in the film adaptation of her book, Mitchell did attend its star-studded premiere in December 1939 in Atlanta. Tragically, she died just 10 years later, after she was struck by a speeding car while crossing Atlanta's Peachtree Street. Scarlett, a relatively unmemorable sequel to Gone with the Wind written by Alexandra Ripley, was published in 1992. Jun 30, 1943: Operation Cartwheel is launched On this day in 1943, General Douglas MacArthur launches Operation Cartwheel, a multi-pronged assault on Rabaul and several islands in the Solomon Sea in the South Pacific. The joint effort takes nine months to complete but succeeds in recapturing more Japanese-controlled territory, further eroding their supremacy in the East. The purpose of Cartwheel was to destroy the barrier formation Japan had created in the Bismark Archipelago, a collection of islands east of New Guinea in the Solomon Sea. The Japanese considered this area vital to the protection of their conquests in the Dutch East Indies and the Philippines. For the Allies, Rabaul, in New Britain, was the key to winning control of this theater of operations, as it served as the Japanese naval headquarters and main base. On June 30, General MacArthur, strategic commander of the area, launched a simultaneous attack, on New Guinea and on New Georgia, as a setup and staging maneuver for the ultimate assault, that on Rabaul. The landing on New Georgia, led by Admiral William Halsey, proved particularly difficult, given the large Japanese garrison stationed there and the harsh climate and topography. Substantial reinforcements were needed before the region could be controlled, in August. One consequence of Cartwheel was a lesson in future strategy. By establishing a "step-by-step" approach to invasion, the Allies unwittingly gave the Japanese time to regroup and establish their next line of defense. The Allies then decided that a new strategy was to be deployed, that of leaving certain islands, or parts thereof, to "wither on the vine," rather than waste valuable time and manpower in fighting it out for marginal gains. A leapfrogging strategy was then employed by MacArthur, whereby he left in place smaller Japanese strongholds in order to concentrate on "bigger fish." Jun 30, 1950: Truman orders U.S. forces to Korea Just three days after the United Nations Security Council voted to provide military assistance to South Korea, President Harry S. Truman orders U.S. armed forces to assist in defending that nation from invading North Korean armies. Truman's dramatic step marked the official entry of the United States into the Korean War. On June 25, 1950, military forces from communist North Korea invaded South Korea. South Korean forces and the small number of U.S. troops stationed in the nation reeled under the surprise attack. On June 27, the United States asked the Security Council in the United Nations to pass a resolution calling on member states of the United Nations to assist South Korea. With the Soviets boycotting the meeting for other reasons, the resolution passed. Three days later, President Truman ordered U.S. ground forces into South Korea and the troops entered South Korea that same day. At the same time, Truman ordered the U.S. Air Force to bomb military targets in North Korea and directed the U.S. Navy to blockade the North Korean coast. Truman's action signaled the beginning of official and large-scale U.S. participation in the Korean War. Over the next three years, the United States provided at least half of the U.N. ground forces in Korea and the vast majority of the air and sea forces used in the conflict against North Korea and, later, against communist China, which entered the war on the side of North Korea in late 1950. Nearly 55,000 Americans were killed in the war and over 100,000 were wounded. Cost estimates for the war ranged as high as $20 billion. In July 1953, an armistice was signed that ended the fighting and left Korea a divided nation. Jun 30, 1953: First Corvette built On this day in 1953, the first production Corvette is built at the General Motors facility in Flint, Michigan. Tony Kleiber, a worker on the assembly line, is given the privilege of driving the now-historic car off the line. Harley J. Earl, the man behind the Corvette, got his start in his father's business, Earl Automobile Works, designing custom auto bodies for Hollywood movie stars such as Fatty Arbuckle. In 1927, General Motors hired Earl to redesign the LaSalle, the mid-range option the company had introduced between the Buick and the Cadillac. Earl's revamped LaSalle sold some 50,000 units by the end of 1929, before the Great Depression permanently slowed sales and it was discontinued in 1940. By that time, Earl had earned more attention for designing the Buick "Y Job," recognized as the industry's first "concept" car. Its relatively long, low body came equipped with innovations such as disappearing headlamps, electric windows and air-cooled brake drums over the wheels like those on an airplane. After scoring another hit with the 1950 Buick LeSabre, Earl headed into the 1950s--a boom decade for car manufacturers--at the top of his game. In January 1953, he introduced his latest "dream car," the Corvette, as part of GM's traveling Motorama display at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City. The sleek Corvette, the first all-fiberglass-bodied American sports car, was an instant hit. It went into production the following June in Flint; 300 models were built that year. All 1953 Corvettes were white convertibles with red interiors and black canvas tops. Underneath its sleek exterior, however, the Corvette was outfitted with parts standard to other GM automobiles, including a "Blue Flame" six-cylinder engine, two-speed Powerglide automatic transmission and the drum brakes from Chevrolet's regular car line. The Corvette's performance as a sports car was disappointing relative to its European competitors, and early sales were unimpressive. GM kept refining the design, however, and the addition of its first V-8 engine in 1955 greatly improved the car's performance. By 1961, the Corvette had cemented its reputation as America's favorite sports car. Today, it continues to rank among the world's elite sports cars in acceleration time, top speed and overall muscle. Jun 30, 1962: Sandy Koufax pitches first no-hitter On June 30, 1962, Sandy Koufax strikes out 13 batters and walks five to lead the Brooklyn Dodgers to victory over the New York Mets 5-0 with his first career no-hitter. Koufax went on to throw three more no-hitters, including a perfect game on September 9, 1965, in which he allowed no hits and no walks. Sandy Koufax was a talented all-around athlete from Borough Park in Brooklyn, New York. His first love was basketball, and he attended the University of Cincinnati on a basketball scholarship. His impressive left arm, however, attracted the attention of major league ball clubs and in 1954 he was signed by the Brooklyn Dodgers. Despite his promising talent, Koufax won just 36 games to 51 losses from 1955 to 1961, and was incredibly inconsistent, blowing hitters away one game and walking runs in the next. Finally, advice from veteran catcher Norm Sherry turned Koufax around. As Koufax recounted in his autobiography, Sherry told him to "take the grunt out of the fastball." From 1962 to 1966, Sandy Koufax executed what are arguably the five greatest seasons by a pitcher in baseball history. His newfound control limited his walks from 4.8 per game to just 2.1. His first no-hitter on this day in 1962 saw him walk five men, but after six innings he had already struck out 12 batters. He pitched a no-hitter every year after that until 1965 and led the Dodgers to World Series wins in 1963 and 1965 and the National League pennant in 1966. He won four World Series games, with a .95 earned run average and 61 strikeouts for his postseason career. Koufax won three Cy Young Awards (1963, 1965 and 1966), all of them unanimous. In 1965 he struck out 382 men, breaking Rube Waddell’s 1904 record of 350 by 32. According to longtime Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully, Koufax was so well-regarded that he would often receive a standing ovation from fans while just warming up for a game. Sandy Koufax retired after the 1966 season at just 30 years old because of arthritis in his elbow. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1972.
30 June Deaths 350 – Nepotianus, Roman ruler 1181 – Hugh de Kevelioc, 5th Earl of Chester, Welsh politician (b. 1147) 1224 – Adolf of Osnabrück, German monk and bishop (b. 1185) 1364 – Arnošt of Pardubice, Czech archbishop (b. 1297) 1538 – Charles II, Duke of Guelders (b. 1467) 1607 – Caesar Baronius, Italian cardinal and historian (b. 1538) 1660 – William Oughtred, English mathematician (b. 1575) 1666 – Alexander Brome, English poet (b. 1620) 1670 – Princess Henrietta of England (b. 1644) 1704 – John Quelch, English pirate (b. 1665) 1708 – Tekle Haymanot I of Ethiopia (b. 1706) 1709 – Edward Lhuyd, Welsh botanist, linguist, and geographer (b. 1660) 1785 – James Oglethorpe, English general and politician, 1st Colonial Governor of Georgia (b. 1696) 1796 – Abraham Yates, Jr., American lawyer and politician (b. 1724) 1857 – Alcide d'Orbigny, French zoologist (b. 1802) 1882 – Charles J. Guiteau, American preacher and lawyer, assassin of James A. Garfield (b. 1841) 1882 – Alberto Henschel, German-Brazilian photographer and businessman (b. 1827) 1890 – Samuel Parkman Tuckerman, American composer (b. 1819) 1899 – E. D. E. N. Southworth, American author (b. 1819) 1913 – Alphonse Kirchhoffer, French fencer (b. 1873) 1917 – Antonio de La Gandara, French painter (b. 1861) 1919 – John Strutt, 3rd Baron Rayleigh, English physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1842) 1932 – Bruno Kastner, German actor, screenwriter, and producer (b. 1890) 1934 – Karl Ernst, German SA officer (b. 1904) 1934 – Erich Klausener, German politician (b. 1885) 1934 – Gustav Ritter von Kahr, German politician, Minister-President of Bavaria (b. 1862) 1934 – Kurt von Schleicher, German general and politician, 23rd Chancellor of Germany (b. 1882) 1934 – Gregor Strasser, German politician (b. 1892) 1941 – Yefim Fomin, Belarusian politician (b. 1909) 1941 – Aleksander Tõnisson, Estonian military commander and politician (b. 1875) 1943 – Carlo Wieth, Danish actor (b. 1885) 1949 – Édouard Alphonse James de Rothschild, French financier and polo player (b. 1868) 1951 – Yrjö Saarela, Finnish wrestler (b. 1884) 1953 – Charles William Miller, Brazilian footballer and civil servant (b. 1874) 1953 – Elsa Beskow, Swedish author and illustrator of children's books (b. 1874) 1954 – Andrass Samuelsen, Faroese politician, 1st Prime Minister of the Faroe Islands (b. 1873) 1956 – Thorleif Lund, Norwegian actor (b. 1880) 1959 – José Vasconcelos, Mexican politician (b. 1882) 1961 – Lee De Forest, American inventor, invented the audion tube (b. 1873) 1966 – Giuseppe Farina, Italian race car driver (b. 1906) 1971 – Georgi Asparuhov, Bulgarian footballer (b. 1943) 1971 – Herbert Biberman, American director and screenwriter (b. 1900) 1971 – Georgy Dobrovolsky Ukrainian pilot and astronaut (b. 1928) 1971 – Nikola Kotkov, Bulgarian footballer (b. 1938) 1971 – Viktor Patsayev, Kazakh engineer and astronaut (b. 1933) 1971 – Vladislav Volkov, Russian engineer and astronaut (b. 1935) 1973 – Nancy Mitford, English author (b. 1904) 1973 – Vasyl Velychkovsky, Ukrainian-Canadian bishop and martyr (b. 1903) 1974 – Vannevar Bush, American engineer (b. 1890) 1976 – Firpo Marberry, American baseball player (b. 1898) 1984 – Lillian Hellman, American author and playwright (b. 1905) 1985 – Haruo Remeliik, Palauan politician, 1st President of Palau (b. 1933) 1993 – Wong Ka Kui, Hong Kong singer-songwriter, guitarist, and actor (Beyond) (b. 1962) 1993 – George McFarland, American actor and singer (b. 1928) 1995 – Georgy Beregovoy, Ukrainian general and astronaut (b. 1921) 1995 – Gale Gordon, American actor and singer (b. 1906) 1995 – Phyllis Hyman, American singer-songwriter and actress (b. 1949) 1996 – Lakis Petropoulos, Greek footballer and manager (b. 1932) 1997 – Larry O'Dea, Australian wrestler (b. 1944) 2000 – Robert L. Manahan, American voice actor (b. 1956) 2001 – Chet Atkins, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (b. 1924) 2001 – Joe Henderson, American saxophonist (b. 1937) 2002 – Chico Xavier, Brazilian medium and author (b. 1910) 2003 – Buddy Hackett, American actor (b. 1924) 2003 – Robert McCloskey, American author and illustrator (b. 1915) 2004 – Jamal Abro, Pakistani author (b. 1924) 2005 – Clancy Eccles, Jamaican singer-songwriter and producer (b. 1940) 2006 – Robert Gernhardt, German poet (b. 1937) 2007 – Sahib Singh Verma, Indian politician, 4th Chief Minister of Delhi (b. 1943) 2009 – Pina Bausch, German dancer, choreographer, and director (b. 1940) 2009 – Robert DePugh, American activist (b. 1923) 2009 – Harve Presnell, American actor and singer (b. 1933) 2010 – Park Yong-ha, South Korean actor and singer (b. 1977) 2011 – Barry Bremen, American businessman (b. 1947) 2012 – Michael Abney-Hastings, 14th Earl of Loudoun (b. 1942) 2012 – Richard Eardley, American politician (b. 1928) 2012 – Miguel S. Demapan, American jurist (b. 1953) 2012 – Ivan Sekyra, Czech singer-songwriter and guitarist (Abraxas) (b. 1952) 2012 – Yitzhak Shamir, Israeli politician, 7th Prime Minister of Israel (b. 1915) 2012 – Yomo Toro, Puerto Rican cuatro player (b. 1933) 2013 – Alan Campbell, Baron Campbell of Alloway, English lawyer and judge (b. 1917) 2013 – Akpor Pius Ewherido, Nigerian politician (b. 1963) 2013 – Juggie Heen, American politician (b. 1930) 2013 – Kathryn Morrison, American educator and politician (b. 1942) 2013 – Thompson Oliha, Nigerian footballer (b. 1968) 2013 – Iván Ruttkay, Hungarian speed skater (b. 1926) 2013 – Keith Seaman, Australian politician, 29th Governor of South Australia (b. 1920) H
Jun 30, 1967: Thieu becomes president The South Vietnamese Armed Forces Council resolves rival claims to the presidency in favor of Nguyen Van Thieu, Chief of State. Former Premier Nguyen Cao Ky, who had announced on May 11 that he would run for president, was forced to accept second place on the presidential ticket. Thieu had been an Army officer in command of the 5th Infantry Division near Saigon when he and other senior South Vietnamese officers led a coup against President Ngo Dinh Diem. Following the coup, a series of groups jockeyed for power. In June 1965, another coup against the civilian government momentarily in power resulted in a 10-man Military National Leadership Committee, which elected Ky as premier and Thieu as Chairman and Chief of State. When elections were held in 1967, the situation was reversed and Thieu became president. In 1971, Ky would choose not to run against Thieu and Thieu would be re-elected to the presidency, although charges of a rigged election surfaced. Pressured by the United States to agree to the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, which left the North Vietnamese in control of large segments of South Vietnam, President Thieu's position was further undermined when the U.S. Congress cut promised military aid. After an open North Vietnamese attack on Phuoc Long Province in November 1974, President Gerald Ford failed to honor U.S. promises to come to the aid of the South Vietnamese in the case of such an attack. With four North Vietnamese corps closing in on Saigon and all hope of outside assistance gone, President Thieu resigned, and on April 25, 1975, he left South Vietnam, flying to Taiwan and then to Great Britain. Jun 30, 1970: Cooper-Church Amendment passes in Senate The Senate votes 58 to 37 in favor of adopting the Cooper-Church amendment to limit presidential power in Cambodia. The amendment barred funds to retain U.S. troops in Cambodia after July 1 or to supply military advisers, mercenaries, or to conduct "any combat activity in the air above Cambodia in direct support of Cambodian forces" without congressional approval. The amendment represented the first limitation ever passed in the Senate concerning the president's powers as commander-in-chief during a war situation. The House of Representatives rejected the amendment on July 9, and it was eventually dropped from the Foreign Military Sales Act. In a written report on the U.S. incursion in Cambodia, President Nixon pronounced it a "successful" operation. Nixon ruled out the use of U.S. troops there in the future, suggesting that Cambodia's defense would be left largely to Cambodia and its allies. Regarding the use of U.S. air power in Cambodia, Nixon stated that the United States would not provide air or logistical support for South Vietnamese forces in Cambodia, but would continue bombing enemy personnel and supply concentrations "with the approval of the Cambodian government." Nixon noted that more than a year's supply of weapons and ammunition had been captured and that 11,349 enemy soldiers were killed by Allied forces during the incursion into the area. Jun 30, 1971: Soviet cosmonauts perish in reentry disaster The three Soviet cosmonauts who served as the first crew of the world's first space station die when their spacecraft depressurizes during reentry. On June 6, the cosmonauts Georgi Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev were launched into space aboard Soyuz 11 on a mission to dock and enter Salyut 1, the Soviet space station that had been placed in orbit in April. The spacecraft successfully docked with the station, and the cosmonauts spent 23 days orbiting the earth. On June 30, they left Salyut 1 and began reentry procedures. When they fired the explosive bolts to separate the Soyuz 11 reentry capsule from another stage of the spacecraft, a critical valve was jerked open. One hundred miles above the earth, the capsule was suddenly exposed to the nearly pressureless environment of space. As the capsule rapidly depressurized, Patsayev tried to close the valve by hand but failed. Minutes later, the cosmonauts were dead. As a result of the tragedy, the Soviet Union did not send any future crews to Salyut 1, and it was more than two years before they attempted another manned mission. Jun 30, 1981: A first-time offender ends up on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List Glen Godwin, a young business owner, is convicted of murder in Riverside County, California, and sentenced to 26-years-to-life in prison. According to his roommate's testimony, Godwin stomped on, choked, and then stabbed Kim LeValley, an acquaintance and local drug dealer, 28 times before using homemade explosives to blow up his body in the desert near Palm Springs. Godwin, who had no previous record, eventually found his way onto the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List. In 1985, while serving his sentence at Soledad Prison, Godwin married Shelley Rose. He was then transferred to Folsom Prison, a maximum-security facility, where he escaped through a 300-yard storm drain and floated across the American River on a raft to freedom in June 1987. Apparently gaining assistance from someone who cut the iron bars on the storm drain from the outside, Godwin was the third person to escape from Folsom in 25 years. Lorenz Karlic, who had once shared a cell with Godwin, was arrested in Hesperia, California, for aiding Godwin in his escape. After two years without any leads on either Glen or Shelley, who was last seen renting a car at the San Jose Airport, authorities were notified of a man in a Mexican prison under the name of Stewart Carrera, whose fingerprints matched those of Godwin's. Reportedly, Mexican authorities had arrested Glen on drugs and weapons charges six months after his escape. While California officials were working to have Godwin extradited back to the United States, he murdered a fellow inmate in Puerto Vallarta Prison—an attempt to avoid returning to the high security prisons in California. Shortly thereafter, he escaped from the Mexican jail. In December 1996, Godwin appeared on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List. Shelley Godwin, who, unbeknownst to California law enforcement officials, had divorced her husband and remarried in Texas, was apprehended in Dallas when a story on the Godwin case appeared on television's America's Most Wanted, but Glen Godwin remains at large. Jun 30, 1989: Do the Right Thing released On this day in 1989, the writer-director Spike Lee’s third feature film, Do the Right Thing--a provocative, racially charged drama that takes place on one block in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, on the hottest day of the year--is released in U.S. theaters. The block in question is home to Sal’s Famous Pizzeria, the only white-owned business in the neighborhood. Mookie (played by Lee) delivers pizza for Sal (Danny Aiello); he is friendly with Sal’s younger son, Vito (Richard Edson), a fact that angers Vito’s brother, Pino (John Turturro), who resents the black majority in the neighborhood. As various characters talk and circulate around Sal’s and the nearby Korean-owned convenience store, tensions build to the breaking point, and violence breaks out, with tragic consequences. Among Do the Right Thing’s memorable supporting characters are the neighborhood staples Da Mayor and Mother-Sister (real-life couple Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee); Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), who continually blasts Public Enemy’s rap song “Fight the Power” from his massive boom box; Mookie’s sister (Joie Lee, Spike’s own sister); his Puerto Rican girlfriend Tina (Rosie Perez, making her feature film debut); and the smooth-talking radio disc jockey Mister Senor Love Daddy (Samuel L. Jackson). Upon its release, Do the Right Thing caused a sensation for its incendiary portrayal of race relations, including specific allusions to some notorious recent events in New York. Some critics, including David Denby (then of New York magazine) speculated that the film would incite black audiences to anger and violence. In an interview with New York magazine in April 2008, the always-outspoken Lee recalled of the controversy: “One of the big criticisms was that I had not provided an answer for racism in the movie, which is insane. And what’s even more insane is people like Joe Klein [who also wrote about the film for New York] and David Denby felt that this film was going to cause riots. Young black males were going to emulate Mookie and throw garbage cans through windows. Like, ‘How dare you release this film in summertime: You know how they get in the summertime, this is like playing with fire.’ I hold no grudges against them. But that was 20 years ago and it speaks for itself.” Nominated for two Oscars--Best Supporting Actor for Aiello and Best Original Screenplay for Lee--Do the Right Thing was later called “culturally significant” by the U.S. Library of Congress and stands to this day as one of Hollywood’s most notable portrayals of modern-day racial tensions. Jun 30, 2003: Make Way for Ducklings author Robert McCloskey dies On this day in 2003, children’s author and illustrator Robert McCloskey, whose books include such classics as “Make Way for Ducklings” and “Blueberries for Sal,” dies at age 88 in Deer Isle, Maine. Born in Hamilton, Ohio, in 1914, McCloskey studied art in Boston and New York in the 1930s. He published his first children’s book, “Lentil,” about a small-town boy who learns to play the harmonica, in 1940. His next book, “Make Way for Ducklings,” released in 1941, is the story of a family of ducklings (Jack, Kack, Lack, Mack, Nack, Ouack, Pack and Quack) who waddle after their mother through the streets of Boston before making a permanent home in the city’s Public Garden. Explaining his inspiration for the story, McCloskey told The New York Times: ''I had first noticed the ducks when walking through the Boston Public Garden every morning on my way to art school. When I returned to Boston four years later, I noticed the traffic problem of the ducks and heard a few stories about them. The book just sort of developed from there.'' In preparation for the book, McCloskey bought some live ducks to study and sketch. In 1942, “Make Way for Ducklings” won a Caldecott Medal, one of the top honors for American children’s books. In 1987, a bronze sculpture of Mrs. Mallard and her eight ducklings was installed in the Boston Public Garden. In 1943, McCloskey published “Homer Price,” about the adventures of a boy in small-town Ohio. “Centerburg Tales: More Adventures of Homer Price” followed in 1951. McCloskey’s other books, each set in Maine, where he lived with his wife and daughters for much of his life, include: “Blueberries for Sal” (1948), about a girl and a bear cub and their mothers hunting for berries; “One Morning in Maine” (1952), about a little girl who loses her first tooth; Caldecott Medal-winner “Time of wonder” (1957), about children spending their summer vacation on an island off the coast of Maine; and “Burt Dow: Deep-Water Man” (1963) about a fisherman who finds shelter from a storm in a whale’s belly. In addition to the eight books he wrote and illustrated, McCloskey illustrated 10 children’s books penned by other authors. Jun 30, 2013: 19 firefighters die in Arizona blaze On this day in 2013, 19 firefighters perish while battling a wildfire near Yarnell, Arizona. All were members of the Granite Mountain Interagency Hotshot Crew, an elite group of wildland firefighters that was part of the Prescott (Arizona) Fire Department. It was the deadliest day for U.S. firefighters since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. What became known as the Yarnell Hill Fire was ignited by a lightning strike at around 5:30 p.m. on June 28 near Yarnell, a former gold-mining town about 35 miles south of Prescott and 80 miles northwest of Phoenix. Two days later, on June 30, the blaze intensified and rapidly spread. That afternoon, the Granite Mountain Hotshots, who had been building a fire line (an area in which all vegetation has been removed to prevent a blaze from spreading) along a ridge top, headed down into a basin and were caught off guard when a sudden change in wind direction sent huge flames straight toward them. With nowhere to escape, the 19 members of the all-male crew deployed small emergency shelters shortly after 4:45 p.m. These shelters, last-ditch safety devices resembling sleeping bags covered in aluminum, can protect against heat but melt at extreme temperatures. The men deployed the shelters as they’d been trained, with the least experienced hotshots going first and the most experienced going last. However, the temperature of the fire reached more than 2,000 degrees, and the shelters only were designed to withstand up to 1,200 degrees. The fallen firefighters were almost all in their 20s or 30s. The lone survivor of the 20-person Granite Mountain crew had been assigned to act as a lookout that day and wasn’t with his fellow hotshots when they were overtaken by the blaze. The Yarnell Hill Fire finally was contained on July 10, after burning some 8,400 acres and destroying more than 100 structures. In September 2013, the Arizona State Forestry Division, which oversaw the firefighting efforts, released the results of an investigation that concluded there was no evidence of negligence or recklessness in the firefighters’ deaths. However, later that year, the Arizona Division of Occupational Safety and Health criticized the Forestry Division's management of the Yarnell Hill fire-suppression operations and charged the agency with, among other things, prioritizing the protection of "non-defensible structures and pastureland" ahead of firefighter safety. "Hotshot" crews of elite firefighters got their start in Southern California in the 1940s. Today, there are approximately 110 crews across the United States.
July 1 is the 182nd day of the year (183rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 183 days remaining until the end of the year. The end of this day marks the halfway point of a leap year. It also falls on the same day of the week as New Year's Day in a leap year. 01 July Events 69 – Tiberius Julius Alexander orders his Roman legions in Alexandria to swear allegiance to Vespasian as Emperor. 552 – Battle of Taginae: Byzantine forces under Narses defeat the Ostrogoths in Italy. During the fightings king Totila is mortally wounded. 1097 – Battle of Dorylaeum: Crusaders led by prince Bohemond of Taranto defeat a Seljuk army led by sultan Kilij Arslan I. 1431 – The Battle of La Higueruela takes place in Granada, leading to a modest advance of Castilian during the Reconquista. 1523 – Johann Esch and Heinrich Voes become the first Lutheran martyrs, burned at the stake by Roman Catholic authorities in Brussels. 1569 – Union of Lublin: the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania confirm a real union; the united country is called the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth or the Republic of Both Nations. 1653 – First meeting of the Westminster Assembly of Divines 1690 – Glorious Revolution: Battle of the Boyne (as reckoned under the Julian calendar). 1766 – Jean-François Lefebvre de la Barre was a young French nobleman, famous for having been tortured and beheaded before his body was burnt on a pyre along with a copy of Voltaire's "Philosophical Dictionary" nailed to his torso for the crime of not saluting a Roman Catholic religious procession in Abbeville, France. 1770 – Lexell's Comet passed closer to the Earth than any other comet in recorded history, approaching to a distance of 0.0146 a.u. 1782 – American privateers attack Lunenburg, Nova Scotia see Raid on Lunenburg (1782). 1837 – A system of the civil registration of births, marriages and deaths is established in England and Wales. 1855 – Signing of the Quinault Treaty: the Quinault and the Quileute cede their land to the United States. 1858 – Joint reading of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace's papers on evolution to the Linnean Society. 1862 – The Russian State Library is founded. 1862 – Princess Alice of the United Kingdom, second daughter of Queen Victoria, marries Prince Louis of Hesse, the future Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse. 1862 – American Civil War: the Battle of Malvern Hill takes place. It is the final battle in the Seven Days Campaign, part of George B. McClellan's Peninsula Campaign. 1863 – Keti Koti (Emancipation Day) in Suriname, marking the abolition of slavery by the Netherlands. 1863 – American Civil War: the Battle of Gettysburg begins. 1867 – The British North America Act of 1867 takes effect as the Constitution of Canada, creating the Canadian Confederation and the federal dominion of Canada; Sir John A. Macdonald is sworn in as the first Prime Minister of Canada. 1870 – The United States Department of Justice formally comes into existence. 1873 – Prince Edward Island joins the Canadian Confederation. 1874 – The Sholes and Glidden typewriter, the first commercially successful typewriter, goes on sale. 1878 – Canada joins the Universal Postal Union. 1879 – Charles Taze Russell publishes the first edition of the religious magazine The Watchtower. 1881 – The world's first international telephone call is made between St. Stephen, New Brunswick, Canada, and Calais, Maine, United States. 1881 – General Order 70, the culmination of the Cardwell and Childers reforms of the British Army, comes into effect. 1885 – The United States terminates reciprocity and fishery agreement with Canada. 1890 – Canada and Bermuda are linked by telegraph cable. 1898 – Spanish–American War: the Battle of San Juan Hill is fought in Santiago de Cuba. 1903 – Start of first Tour de France bicycle race. 1908 – SOS is adopted as the international distress signal. 1911 – Germany despatched the gunship Panther to Morocco, sparking the Agadir Crisis. 1915 – Leutnant Kurt Wintgens of the then-named German Fliegertruppe air service achieves the first known aerial victory with a synchronized machine-gun armed fighter plane, the Fokker M.5K/MG Eindecker. 1916 – World War I: First day on the Somme – On the first day of the Battle of the Somme 19,000 soldiers of the British Army are killed and 40,000 wounded. 1921 – The Communist Party of China is founded. 1922 – The Great Railroad Strike of 1922 begins in the United States. 1923 – The Canadian Parliament suspends all Chinese immigration. 1931 – United Airlines begins service (as Boeing Air Transport). 1935 – Regina, Saskatchewan police and Royal Canadian Mounted Police ambush strikers participating in On-to-Ottawa Trek. 1942 – World War II: first Battle of El Alamein. 1942 – The Australian Federal Government becomes the sole collector of income tax in Australia as the State Income Tax is abolished. 1943 – Tokyo City merges with Tokyo Prefecture and is dissolved. Since then, no city in Japan has had the name "Tokyo" (present-day Tokyo is not officially a city). 1947 – The Philippine Air Force is established. 1948 – Muhammad Ali Jinnah (Quaid-i-Azam) inaugurates Pakistan's central bank, the State Bank of Pakistan. 1949 – The merger of two princely states of India, Cochin and Travancore, into the state of Thiru-Kochi (later re-organized as Kerala) in the Indian Union ends more than 1,000 years of princely rule by the Cochin Royal Family. 1957 – The International Geophysical Year begins. 1958 – The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation links television broadcasting across Canada via microwave. 1958 – Flooding of Canada's St. Lawrence Seaway begins. 1959 – The Party of the African Federation holds its constitutive conference. 1959 – Specific values for the international yard, avoirdupois pound and derived units (e.g. inch, mile and ounce) are adopted after agreement between the U.S.A., the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth countries. 1960 – Independence of Somalia. 1960 – Ghana becomes a Republic and Kwame Nkrumah becomes its first President as Queen Elizabeth II ceases to be its Head of state. 1962 – Independence of Rwanda. 1962 – Independence of Burundi. 1963 – ZIP codes are introduced for United States mail. 1963 – The British Government admits that former diplomat Kim Philby had worked as a Soviet agent. 1966 – The first color television transmission in Canada takes place from Toronto. 1967 – The European Community is formally created out of a merger with the Common Market, the European Coal and Steel Community, and the European Atomic Energy Commission. 1967 – Canada celebrates the 100th anniversary of the British North America Act, 1867, which officially made Canada its own federal dominion. 1968 – The CIA's Phoenix Program is officially established. 1968 – The Nuclear non-proliferation treaty is signed in Washington, D.C., London and Moscow by sixty-two countries. 1968 – Formal separation of the United Auto Workers from the AFL–CIO. 1970 – President General Yahya Khan abolishes One-Unit of West Pakistan restoring the provinces. 1972 – The first Gay Pride march in England takes place. 1976 – Portugal grants autonomy to Madeira. 1978 – The Northern Territory in Australia is granted Self-Government. 1979 – Sony introduces the Walkman. 1980 – "O Canada" officially becomes the national anthem of Canada. 1981 – The Wonderland murders occurred in the early morning hours, allegedly masterminded by businessman and drug dealer Eddie Nash. 1983 – A North Korean Ilyushin Il-62M jet en route to Conakry Airport in Guinea crashes into the Fouta Djallon mountains in Guinea-Bissau, killing all 23 people on board. 1984 – The PG-13 rating is introduced by the MPAA. 1987 – The American radio station WFAN in New York, New York is launched as the world's first all-sports radio station. 1990 – German reunification: East Germany accepts the Deutsche Mark as its currency, thus uniting the economies of East and West Germany. 1991 – The Warsaw Pact is officially dissolved at a meeting in Prague. 1997 – China resumes sovereignty over the city-state of Hong Kong, ending 156 years of British colonial rule. 1999 – The Scottish Parliament is officially opened by Elizabeth II on the day that legislative powers are officially transferred from the old Scottish Office in London to the new devolved Scottish Executive in Edinburgh. 2002 – The International Criminal Court is established to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression. 2002 – Bashkirian Airlines Flight 2937 and a DHL (German cargo) Boeing 757 collide in mid-air over Überlingen, southern Germany, killing 71. 2003 – Over 500,000 people protested against efforts to pass anti-sedition legislation in Hong Kong. 2004 – Saturn orbit insertion of Cassini–Huygens begins at 01:12 UTC and ends at 02:48 UTC. 2006 – The first operation of Qinghai–Tibet Railway in China. 2007 – Smoking in England is banned in all public indoor spaces. 2008 – Rioting erupted in Mongolia in response to allegations of fraud surrounding the 2008 legislative elections. 2013 – Croatia becomes the 28th member of the European Union. 2013 – The United Nations mission MINUSMA begins its operative mandate in Mali. 2013 – Neptune's moon S/2004 N 1 is discovered. 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Jul 1, 1775: Congress resolves to forge Indian alliances On this day in 1775, the Continental Congress resolves to recruit Indian nations to the American side in their dispute with the British, should the British take native allies of their own. The motion read: “That in case any Agent of the ministry, shall induce the Indian tribes, or any of them to commit actual hostilities against these colonies, or to enter into an offensive Alliance with the British troops, thereupon the colonies ought to avail themselves of an Alliance with such Indian Nations as will enter into the same, to oppose such British troops and their Indian Allies.” Few “such Indians Nations” saw any advantage to joining the Patriot cause. Rather, they saw Great Britain as their last defense against the encroaching land-hungry European settlers into their ancestral territory. Racist settlers managed to undermine any residual trust remaining in the Native American population during the revolution by committing atrocities such as the massacre of neutral, Christian Indian women and children at prayer in Gnaddenhutten, Pennsylvania, in 1778. In another example, a Continental officer undermined his own cause with the murder of Cornplanter, a Shawnee leader and Patriot ally, in 1777. At the close of the War for Independence, the Patriots’ few Indian allies received worse treatment at the hands of their supposed allies than natives who had sided with Britain. Having promised Continental soldiers land in return for their service, Congress seized land from its Indian allies in order to cede it to officers on the verge of mutiny in 1783. Jul 1, 1804: George Sand is born Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin, later known as author George Sand, is born in France on this day. Sand's father, a descendant of a king of Poland through illegitimate lines, had been married to her mother, a Parisian bird-seller, for only a month when Sand was born. Her father died when she was four. Three years later, Sand went to live on her wealthy grandmother's country estate. Sand attended convent school in Paris and returned to the country in 1820, where she spurned her grandmother's attempts to arrange a marriage for her. After her grandmother's death in 1821, Sand married Casimir Francois Dudevant, the son of a baron, and became Baroness Dudevant. The couple had two children but also serious differences. Sand began spending six months of the year in Paris, where she lived with her lover, a law student. She began to write for a Parisian newspaper, Le Figaro, sometimes under the byline J. Sand or Georges Sand. Her first novel, Indiana, was published in 1832. Sand engaged in a series of long love affairs and sued her husband for legal separation in 1836. Two years later, she began an affair with the composer Frederic Chopin, which lasted nearly a decade. Sand retired to her country estate, which she had inherited from her grandmother, and wrote books, including many novels and a 20-volume autobiography. In her writing, Sand affirmed the equality of women, the injustice of arranged marriages, and the need for women's sexual freedom. She also included socialist or rustic themes in many of her novels. She died in June 1876. Jul 1, 1863: The Battle of Gettysburg begins The largest military conflict in North American history begins this day when Union and Confederate forces collide at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The epic battle lasted three days and resulted in a retreat to Virginia by Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. Two months prior to Gettysburg, Lee had dealt a stunning defeat to the Army of the Potomac at Chancellorsville, Virginia. He then made plans for a Northern invasion in order to relieve pressure on war-weary Virginia and to seize the initiative from the Yankees. His army, numbering about 80,000, began moving on June 3. The Army of the Potomac, commanded by Joseph Hooker and numbering just under 100,000, began moving shortly thereafter, staying between Lee and Washington, D.C. But on June 28, frustrated by the Lincoln administration's restrictions on his autonomy as commander, Hooker resigned and was replaced by George G. Meade. Meade took command of the Army of the Potomac as Lee's army moved into Pennsylvania. On the morning of July 1, advance units of the forces came into contact with one another just outside of Gettysburg. The sound of battle attracted other units, and by noon the conflict was raging. During the first hours of battle, Union General John Reynolds was killed, and the Yankees found that they were outnumbered. The battle lines ran around the northwestern rim of Gettysburg. The Confederates applied pressure all along the Union front, and they slowly drove the Yankees through the town. By evening, the Federal troops rallied on high ground on the southeastern edge of Gettysburg. As more troops arrived, Meade's army formed a three-mile long, fishhook-shaped line running from Culp's Hill on the right flank, along Cemetery Hill and Cemetery Ridge, to the base of Little Round Top. The Confederates held Gettysburg, and stretched along a six-mile arc around the Union position. Lee’s forces would continue to batter each end of the Union position, before launching the infamous Pickett’s Charge against the Union center on July 3. Jul 1, 1867: Canadian Independence Day The autonomous Dominion of Canada, a confederation of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the future provinces of Ontario and Quebec, is officially recognized by Great Britain with the passage of the British North America Act. During the 19th century, colonial dependence gave way to increasing autonomy for a growing Canada. In 1841, Upper and Lower Canada--now known as Ontario and Quebec--were made a single province by the Act of Union. In the 1860s, a movement for a greater Canadian federation grew out of the need for a common defense, the desire for a national railroad system, and the necessity of finding a solution to the problem of French and British conflict. When the Maritime provinces, which sought union among themselves, called a conference in 1864, delegates from the other provinces of Canada attended. Later in the year, another conference was held in Quebec, and in 1866 Canadian representatives traveled to London to meet with the British government. On July 1, 1867, with passage of the British North America Act, the Dominion of Canada was officially established as a self-governing entity within the British Empire. Two years later, Canada acquired the vast possessions of the Hudson's Bay Company, and within a decade the provinces of Manitoba and Prince Edward Island had joined the Canadian federation. In 1885, the Canadian Pacific Railway was completed, making mass settlement across the vast territory of Canada possible. Jul 1, 1887: Gunfighter Clay Allison killed Clay Allison, eccentric gunfighter and rancher, dies in a freak wagon accident in Texas. Born around 1840 in Waynesboro, Tennessee, Allison seemed to display odd tendencies from a young age. When the Civil War broke out, he joined the Confederate Army but received a rare medical discharge for a condition that doctors called "partly epileptic and partly maniacal," resulting perhaps from an early childhood head injury. After spending some time as a cowhand for the famous Texas ranchers Oliver Loving and Charles Goodnight, Allison started his own ranch near Cimarron, New Mexico. For a time, he got along well with the local residents, but his tendencies toward violent rages soon became apparent. In October 1870, Allison led an angry mob that seized an accused murderer named Charles Kennedy from the local jail and hanged him. Such vigilante justice was not unusual, but many townspeople were shocked when a wild-eyed Allison decapitated Kennedy and displayed his head on a pole in a local saloon. In 1874, Allison's dangerous reputation grew when he beat a famed gunfighter to the draw, coolly shooting his opponent squarely above the right eye. A year later, Allison joined another lynch mob and helped hang suspected murderer Cruz Vega from a telegraph pole. Again, merely killing the man did not satisfy Allison's blood lust. He shot Vega's corpse in the back and then dragged it over rocks and bushes until it was a mangled pulp. In 1881, Allison married and moved his ranch to the Texas Panhandle. His wife eventually bore him two daughters, and perhaps family life mellowed him. His behavior, however, remained extremely eccentric, and he occasionally lapsed into violent rages. Once he rode nude through the streets of Mobeetie, Texas. On another occasion, he visited a dentist in Cheyenne, Wyoming, who began drilling on the wrong tooth. After having his bad tooth repaired by a different doctor, Allison returned to the offending dentist, pinned him down, and extracted a tooth with a pair of pliers. On this day in 1887, Allison died while driving a freight wagon to his ranch north of Pecos, Texas. A sudden jolt threw Allison from the wagon and a wheel rolled over his head, crushing his skull and neck. In 1975, Allison's remains were moved to a grave in downtown Pecos where a granite headstone made the questionable assertion that he was a "Gentleman and Gunfighter" who "never killed a man that did not need killing." Jul 1, 1898: The Battle of San Juan Hill As part of their campaign to capture Spanish-held Santiago de Cuba on the southern coast of Cuba, the U.S. Army Fifth Corps engages Spanish forces at El Caney and San Juan Hill. In May 1898, one month after the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, a Spanish fleet docked in the Santiago de Cuba harbor after racing across the Atlantic from Spain. A superior U.S. naval force arrived soon after and blockaded the harbor entrance. In June, the U.S. Army Fifth Corps landed on Cuba with the aim of marching to Santiago and launching a coordinated land and sea assault on the Spanish stronghold. Included among the U.S. ground troops were the Theodore Roosevelt-led "Rough Riders," a collection of Western cowboys and Eastern blue bloods officially known as the First U.S. Voluntary Cavalry. The U.S. Army Fifth Corps fought its way to Santiago's outer defenses, and on July 1 U.S. General William Shafter ordered an attack on the village of El Caney and San Juan Hill. Shafter hoped to capture El Caney before besieging the fortified heights of San Juan Hill, but the 500 Spanish defenders of the village put up a fierce resistance and held off 10 times their number for most of the day. Although El Caney was not secure, some 8,000 Americans pressed forward toward San Juan Hill. Hundreds fell under Spanish gunfire before reaching the base of the heights, where the force split up into two flanks to take San Juan Hill and Kettle Hill. The Rough Riders were among the troops in the right flank attacking Kettle Hill. When the order was given by Lieutenant John Miley that "the heights must be taken at all hazards," the Rough Riders, who had been forced to leave their horses behind because of transportation difficulties, led the charge up the hills. The Rough Riders and the black soldiers of the 9th and 10th Cavalry regiments were the first up Kettle Hill, and San Juan Hill was taken soon after. From the crest, the Americans found themselves overlooking Santiago, and the next day they began a siege of the city. On July 3, the Spanish fleet was destroyed off Santiago by U.S. warships under Admiral William Sampson, and on July 17 the Spanish surrendered the city--and thus Cuba--to the Americans. Jul 1, 1916: Battle of the Somme begins At 7:30 a.m., the British launch a massive offensive against German forces in the Somme River region of France. During the preceding week, 250,000 Allied shells had pounded German positions near the Somme, and 100,000 British soldiers poured out of their trenches and into no-man's-land on July 1, expecting to find the way cleared for them. However, scores of heavy German machine guns had survived the artillery onslaught, and the infantry were massacred. By the end of the day, 20,000 British soldiers were dead and 40,000 wounded. It was the single heaviest day of casualties in British military history. The disastrous Battle of the Somme stretched on for more than four months, with the Allies advancing a total of just five miles. When World War I broke out in August 1914, great throngs of British men lined up to enlist in the war effort. At the time, it was generally thought that the war would be over within six months. However, by the end of 1914 well over a million soldiers of various nationalities had been killed on the battlefields of Europe, and a final victory was not in sight for either the Allies or the Central Powers. On the Western Front--the battle line that stretched across northern France and Belgium--the combatants had settled down in the trenches for a terrible war of attrition. Maimed and shell-shocked troops returning to Britain with tales of machine guns, artillery barrages, and poison gas seriously dampened the enthusiasm of potential new volunteers. With the aim of raising enough men to launch a decisive offensive against Germany, Britain replaced voluntary service with conscription in January 1916, when it passed an act calling for the enlistment of all unmarried men between the ages of 18 and 41. After Germany launched a massive offensive of its own against Verdun in February, Britain expanded the Military Service Act, calling for the conscription of all men, married and unmarried, between the ages of 18 and 41. Near the end of June, with the Battle of Verdun still raging, Britain prepared for its major offensive along a 21-mile stretch of the Western Front north of the Somme River. For a week, the British bombarded the German trenches as a prelude to the attack. British Field Marshal Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, thought the artillery would decimate the German defenses and allow a British breakthrough; in fact, it served primarily to remove the element of surprise. When the bombardment died down on the morning of July 1, the German machine crews emerged from their fortified trenches and set up their weapons. At 7:30 a.m., 11 British divisions attacked at once, and the majority of them were gunned down. The soldiers optimistically carried heavy supplies for a long march, but few made it more than a couple of hundred yards. Five French divisions that attacked south of the Somme at the same time fared a little better, but without British success little could be done to exploit their gains. After the initial disaster, Haig resigned himself to smaller but equally ineffectual advances, and more than 1,000 Allied lives were extinguished for every 100 yards gained on the Germans. Even Britain's September 15 introduction of tanks into warfare for the first time in history failed to break the deadlock in the Battle of the Somme. In October, heavy rains turned the battlefield into a sea of mud, and on November 18 Haig called off the Somme offensive after more than four months of mass slaughter. Except for its effect of diverting German troops from the Battle of Verdun, the offensive was a miserable disaster. It amounted to a total gain of just 125 square miles for the Allies, with more than 600,000 British and French soldiers killed, wounded, or missing in the action. German casualties were more than 650,000. Although Haig was severely criticized for the costly battle, his willingness to commit massive amounts of men and resources to the stalemate along the Western Front did eventually contribute to the collapse of an exhausted Germany in 1918. Jul 1, 1916: Dwight D. Eisenhower marries "his Mamie" On this day in 1916, a 25-year-old Army lieutenant named Dwight D. Eisenhower marries 19-year-old Mamie Geneva Doud at her parents home in Denver, Colorado. He would go on to become the nation's 34th president. Dwight and Mamie had a short courtship. They met in 1915 while he was stationed near San Antonio, Texas, where her parents were wintering away from the Colorado snow and cold. She was bright, thrifty and a talented pianist. He was a West Point graduate on a career military track–he would eventually become the supreme Allied commander of the European Front in World War II and the leader of the invasion of Normandy in June 1944. During the war, Mamie and "Ike," as he was called, were apart for three years. Rumors abounded during that time that Eisenhower was having an affair with his Jeep driver, Kay Summersby. Eisenhower never publicly admitted to an inappropriate relationship with Summersby, but a book of tellingly intimate correspondence between Kay and Ike was published after his death in 1969. Mamie remained silent on the matter until her death. After the war, Eisenhower served as president of Columbia University from 1948 to 1950 and Mamie set up house in New York. When he returned to military service as commander of NATO in December 1959, Mamie gamely moved to Paris with him. It would not be the only move of their marriage: according to the National First Ladies Library, the couple lived in 33 homes during Eisenhower's 37-year military career. Mamie also toured the country extensively with him in support of his presidential campaign in 1952, during which, at each stop, he would introduce her to the crowd as "my Mamie." By the time Mamie moved into the White House as first lady in 1953, she had plenty of experience adapting to new situations. During Ike's presidency, Mamie played the part of the consummate 1950s wife and hostess. Eisenhower deferred to her plans to redecorate the White House and gave her full rein in organizing White House social functions. Mamie exerted her influence quietly but clearly: in 1953, for example, she refused to send the controversial Senator Joseph McCarthy an invitation to the annual vice president's dinner. During his tenure in the White House, Eisenhower suffered three health-related episodes that took him out of commission for weeks at a time: a heart attack in September 1955, a gallstone operation in 1956 and a mild stroke in November 1957. At each of these times, Mamie acted as a buffer between her husband and the daily demands of the presidency. While she did not make decisions for him, she screened visitors, managed his healthcare and diet, answered his mail and attended public functions in his absence. Dwight called Mamie "my invaluable, my indispensable, but publicly inarticulate lifelong partner. She is a very shrewd observer. I got it into my head that I'd better listen when she talked about someone brought in close to me." After leaving the White House, Mamie and Dwight traveled and remained active in public life and in the Republican Party. Their grandson, David, married President Richard Nixon's daughter Julie in 1968. The next year, Eisenhower died of heart failure at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C. with Mamie at his side. She passed away in 1979 at the age of 82.
01 July Births 1481 – Christian II of Denmark (d. 1559) 1506 – Louis II of Hungary (d. 1526) 1534 – Frederick II of Denmark (d. 1588) 1574 – Joseph Hall, English bishop (d. 1656) 1586 – Claudio Saracini, Italian lute player and composer (d. 1630) 1633 – Johann Heinrich Heidegger, Swiss theologian (d. 1698) 1646 – Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, German mathematician and philosopher (d. 1716) 1663 – Franz Xaver Murschhauser, German composer and theorist (d. 1738) 1723 – Pedro Rodríguez, Conde de Campomanes, Spanish politician (d. 1802) 1725 – Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de Rochambeau, French general (d. 1807) 1731 – Adam Duncan, 1st Viscount Duncan Scottish-English admiral (d. 1804) 1742 – Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, German physicist (d. 1799) 1771 – Ferdinando Paer, Italian composer (d. 1839) 1788 – Jean-Victor Poncelet, French mathematician and engineer (d. 1867) 1804 – Charles Gordon Greene, American journalist and politician (d. 1886) 1804 – George Sand, French author (d. 1876) 1807 – Thomas Green Clemson, American politician and educator, founded Clemson University (d. 1888) 1818 – Ignaz Semmelweis, Hungarian physician (d. 1865) 1822 – Nguyễn Đình Chiểu, Vietnamese poet (d. 1888) 1834 – Jadwiga Łuszczewska, Polish poet and author (d. 1908) 1863 – William Grant Stairs, Canadian-English captain and explorer (d. 1892) 1869 – William Strunk, Jr., American author and educator (d. 1946) 1872 – Louis Blériot, French pilot and engineer (d. 1936) 1873 – Alice Guy-Blaché, American director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 1968) 1875 – Andrass Samuelsen, Faroese politician, 1st Prime Minister of the Faroe Islands (d. 1954) 1878 – Jacques Rosenbaum, Baltic German architect (d. 1944) 1879 – Léon Jouhaux, French union leader, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1954) 1882 – Bidhan Chandra Roy, Indian physician and politician, 2nd Chief Minister of West Bengal (d. 1962) 1883 – Arthur Borton, English colonel, Victoria Cross recipient (d. 1933) 1885 – Dorothea Mackellar, Australian author and poet (d. 1968) 1886 – Gabrielle Robinne, French actress (d. 1980) 1887 – Amber Reeves, New Zealand-English author and scholar (d. 1981) 1892 – James M. Cain, American author and journalist (d. 1977) 1899 – Thomas A. Dorsey, American pianist and composer (d. 1993) 1899 – Charles Laughton, English-American actor and director (d. 1962) 1899 – Konstantinos Tsatsos, Greek politician, President of Greece (d. 1987) 1901 – Irna Phillips, American actress and screenwriter (d. 1973) 1902 – William Wyler, French-American director, producer, and screenwriter (d. 1981) 1903 – Amy Johnson, English pilot (d. 1941) 1903 – Beatrix Lehmann, English actress, theatre director and author (d. 1979) 1906 – Jean Dieudonné, French mathematician (d. 1992) 1906 – Estée Lauder, American businesswoman, co-founded the Estée Lauder Companies (d. 2004) 1907 – Bill Stern, American actor and sportscaster (d. 1971) 1908 – Peter Anders, German tenor (d. 1954) 1908 – Ed Gordon, American long jumper (d. 1971) 1909 – Emmett Toppino, American sprinter (d. 1971) 1910 – Glenn Hardin, American hurdler (d. 1975) 1911 – Arnold Alas, Estonian landscape architect and artist (d. 1990) 1911 – Sergey Leonidovich Sokolov, Russian marshal and politician, Minister of Defence for the Soviet Union (d. 2012) 1912 – David Brower, American environmentalist, founded Sierra Club Foundation (d. 2000) 1912 – Sally Kirkland, American journalist (d. 1989) 1913 – Frank Barrett, American baseball player (d. 1998) 1913 – Vasantrao Naik, Indian politician, 3rd Chief Minister of Maharashtra (d. 1979) 1914 – P. Kandiah, Ceylonese politician (d. 1960) 1914 – Earle Warren, American saxophonist and singer (d. 1994) 1915 – Willie Dixon, American singer-songwriter, musician, and producer (d. 1992) 1915 – Joseph Ransohoff, American neurosurgeon (d. 2001) 1915 – Jean Stafford, American author (d. 1979) 1915 – Nguyen Van Linh, Vietnamese politician (d. 1998) 1916 – Olivia de Havilland, Japanese-American actress 1916 – George C. Stoney, American director and producer (d. 2012) 1917 – Humphry Osmond, English-American psychiatrist (d. 2004) 1919 – Arnold Meri, Soviet Estonian military commander (d. 2009) 1920 – Henri Amouroux, French historian and journalist (d. 2007) 1920 – Jean-Marie Fortier, Canadian archbishop (d. 2002) 1920 – Harold Sakata, American wrestler and actor (d. 1982) 1921 – Seretse Khama, Batswana politician, 1st President of Botswana (d. 1980) 1922 – Toshi Seeger, American activist, co-founded the Clearwater Festival (d. 2013) 1924 – Antoni Ramallets, Spanish footballer and manager (d. 2013) 1924 – Florence Stanley, American actress and director (d. 2003) 1925 – Farley Granger, American actor (d. 2011) 1925 – Amar Kant, Indian author (d. 2012) 1926 – Robert Fogel, American economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2013) 1926 – Carl Hahn, German businessman 1926 – Hans Werner Henze, German composer (d. 2012) 1927 – Alan J. Charig, English paleontologist (d. 1997) 1928 – Bobby Day, American singer-songwriter, pianist, and producer (The Hollywood Flames and Bob & Earl) (d. 1990) 1929 – Gerald Edelman, American biologist and immunologist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2014) 1929 – Ödön Földessy, Hungarian long jumper 1930 – Moustapha Akkad, Syrian-American director and producer (d. 2005) 1930 – Carol Chomsky, American linguist (d. 2008) 1931 – Leslie Caron, French actress and dancer 1932 – Ze'ev Schiff, Israeli journalist (d. 2007) 1933 – C. Scott Littleton, American anthropologist and academic (d. 2010) 1934 – Claude Berri, French actor, director, and screenwriter (d. 2009) 1934 – Jamie Farr, American actor and screenwriter 1934 – Jean Marsh, English actress and screenwriter 1934 – Sydney Pollack, American actor, director, and producer (d. 2008) 1935 – James Cotton, American singer-songwriter and harmonica player 1935 – David Prowse, English bodybuilder and actor 1936 – Syl Johnson, American singer, guitarist, and producer 1938 – Craig Anderson, American baseball player 1938 – Hariprasad Chaurasia, Indian flute player 1939 – Karen Black, American actress, singer, and screenwriter (d. 2013) 1939 – Delaney Bramlett, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (Delaney & Bonnie) (d. 2008) 1939 – Dudley Knight, American actor and educator (d. 2013) 1940 – Craig Brown, Scottish footballer and manager 1941 – Rod Gilbert, Canadian-American ice hockey player 1941 – Alfred G. Gilman, American pharmacologist, Nobel Prize laureate 1941 – Myron Scholes, American economist, Nobel Prize laureate 1941 – Twyla Tharp, American dancer and choreographer 1942 – Geneviève Bujold, Canadian actress 1942 – Andraé Crouch, American singer-songwriter and pastor 1943 – Peeter Lepp, Estonian politician 1943 – Jeff Wayne, American pianist and composer 1944 – Lew Rockwell, American author and activist 1945 – Mike Burstyn, Israeli-American actor and singer 1945 – Debbie Harry, American singer-songwriter and actress (Blondie and The Wind in the Willows) 1946 – Mick Aston, English archaeologist and academic (d. 2013) 1946 – Masaharu Satō, Japanese voice actor 1946 – Erkki Tuomioja, Finnish politician 1947 – Shirley Hemphill, American actress (d. 1999) 1947 – Kazuyoshi Hoshino, Japanese race car driver 1947 – Malcolm Wicks, English politician (d. 2012) 1948 – John Ford, English-American singer-songwriter and guitarist (Strawbs, The Monks, and Elmer Gantry's Velvet Opera) 1949 – Néjia Ben Mabrouk, Tunisian-Belgian director and screenwriter 1949 – John Farnham, English-Australian singer-songwriter (Little River Band) 1949 – David Hogan, American composer (d. 1996) 1949 – Venkaiah Naidu, Indian politician 1950 – David Duke, American politician and activist 1951 – Trevor Eve, English actor and producer 1951 – Anne Feeney, American singer-songwriter and activist 1951 – Klaus-Peter Justus, German long-distance runner 1951 – Tom Kozelko, American basketball player 1951 – Terrence Mann, American actor, singer, and dancer 1951 – Fred Schneider, American singer-songwriter and keyboard player (The B-52's and The Superions) 1951 – Victor Willis, American singer-songwriter, pianist, and actor (Village People) 1952 – Dan Aykroyd, Canadian actor, screenwriter, and producer 1952 – Steve Shutt, Canadian ice hockey player and sportscaster 1952 – Timothy J. Tobias, American composer (d. 2006) 1953 – Lawrence Gonzi, Maltese politician, 12th Prime Minister of Malta 1953 – Jadranka Kosor, Croatian journalist and politician, 9th Prime Minister of Croatia 1955 – Li Keqiang, Chinese politician, 7th Premier of the People's Republic of China 1955 – Lisa Scottoline, American author 1955 – Keith Whitley, American singer and guitarist (d. 1989) 1956 – Ulf Larsson, Swedish actor and director (d. 2009) 1956 – Alan Ruck, American actor 1956 – Lorna Patterson, American film, stage and television actress 1957 – Lisa Blount, American actress and producer (d. 2010) 1957 – Hannu Kamppuri, Finnish ice hockey player 1957 – Sean O'Driscoll, English footballer and manager 1959 – Dale Midkiff, American actor 1960 – Lynn Jennings, American long-distance runner 1960 – Evelyn King, American singer 1960 – Kevin Swords, American rugby player 1961 – Malcolm Elliott, English cyclist 1961 – Carl Lewis, American long jumper and runner 1961 – Diana, Princess of Wales (d. 1997) 1961 – Michelle Wright, Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist 1962 – Andre Braugher, American actor 1963 – Roddy Bottum, American singer and keyboard player (Faith No More and Imperial Teen) 1963 – David Wood, American lawyer and environmentalist (d. 2006) 1964 – Bernard Laporte, French rugby player and coach 1965 – Harald Zwart, Norwegian director and producer 1965 – Carl Fogarty, English motorcycle racer 1966 – Enrico Annoni, Italian footballer 1966 – Shawn Burr, Canadian-American ice hockey player (d. 2013) 1967 – Pamela Anderson, Canadian-American model, actress, and producer 1967 – Sansan Chien, Taiwanese composer (d. 2011) 1967 – Marisa Monte, Brazilian singer (Tribalistas) 1968 – Tim Abell, American actor and producer 1968 – Jordi Mollà, Spanish actor, director, and screenwriter 1969 – Séamus Egan, Irish singer-songwriter and guitarist (Solas) 1970 – Melissa Peterman, American actress and producer 1970 – Nikos Samaras, Greek volleyball player (d. 2013) 1970 – Henry Simmons, American actor 1971 – Steven W. Bailey, American actor 1971 – Amira Casar, English-French actress 1971 – Missy Elliott, American rapper, producer, dancer, and actress 1971 – Julianne Nicholson, American actress 1971 – Jamie Walker, American baseball player 1972 – Sunshine Becker, American singer (Furthur) 1972 – Claire Forlani, English actress 1972 – Alex Machacek, Austrian guitarist (BPM and CAB) 1972 – Steffi Nerius, German javelin thrower 1974 – Jefferson Pérez, Ecuadorian race walker 1975 – Sean Colson, American basketball player 1975 – Sufjan Stevens, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (Danielson and Marzuki) 1976 – Plies, American rapper 1976 – Kellie Bright, English actress 1976 – Patrick Kluivert, Dutch footballer and coach 1976 – Justin Lo, American-Hong Kong singer-songwriter and actor 1976 – Thomas Sadoski, American actor 1976 – Hannu Tihinen, Finnish footballer 1976 – Ruud van Nistelrooy, Dutch footballer 1976 – Szymon Ziółkowski, Polish hammer thrower 1977 – Tom Frager, French singer-songwriter and guitarist 1977 – Jarome Iginla, Canadian ice hockey player 1977 – Greg Pattillo, American flute player (Project Trio) 1977 – Birgit Schuurman, Dutch singer and actress 1977 – Pamela Rogers Turner, American educator and sex offender 1977 – Liv Tyler, American actress and model 1979 – Forrest Griffin, American mixed martial artist 1980 – Patrick Aufiero, American ice hockey player 1980 – Nelson Cruz, Dominican baseball player 1981 – Carlo Del Fava, South African-Italian rugby player 1981 – Tadhg Kennelly, Irish-Australian footballer 1981 – Genevieve Valentine, American author 1982 – Hilarie Burton, American actress 1982 – Carmella DeCesare, American model and wrestler 1982 – Justin Huber, Australian baseball player 1982 – Joachim Johansson, Swedish tennis player 1982 – Adrian Ward, American football player 1983 – Lynsey Bartilson, American actress and producer 1983 – Marit Larsen, Norwegian singer-songwriter and keyboard player ([[M2M (band)|M 1983 – Leeteuk, South Korean singer-songwriter, dancer, and actor (Super Junior)2M]]) 1984 – Morgane Dubled, French model 1984 – Donald Thomas, Bahamian high jumper 1985 – Chris Perez, American baseball player 1985 – Léa Seydoux, French actress 1986 – Andrew Lee, Australian footballer 1986 – Agnes Monica, Indonesian singer-songwriter, producer, and actress 1986 – Julian Prochnow, German footballer 1986 – Casey Reinhardt, American model and actress 1987 – Emily Glenister, English actress 1987 – Michael Schrader, German decathlete 1988 – Dedé, Brazilian footballer 1988 – Evan Ellingson, American actor 1989 – Mitch Hewer, English actor, singer, and dancer 1989 – Hannah Murray, English actress 1989 – Daniel Ricciardo, Australian race car driver 1990 – Young B., American rapper 1990 – Ben Coker, English footballer 1990 – Natsuki Sato, Japanese singer (AKB48) 1991 – Serenay Sarıkaya, Turkish model and actress, Miss Turkey 2010 1992 – Mia Malkova, American pornographic actress 1992 – Hannah Whelan, English gymnast 1993 – Anna Pohlak, Estonian sailor 1993 – Raini Rodriguez, American actress 1994 – Montserrat González, Paraguayan tennis player 1994 – Anri Okamoto, Japanese model and actress 1996 – Adelina Sotnikova, Russian figure skater D
Jul 1, 1942: The Battle of El Alamein begins On this day in 1942, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel is brought to a standstill in the battle for control of North Africa. In June, the British had succeeded in driving Rommel into a defensive position in Libya. But Rommel repelled repeated air and tank attacks, delivering heavy losses to the armored strength of the British, and finally, using his panzer divisions, managed to force a British retreat—a retreat so rapid that a huge quantity of supplies was left behind. In fact, Rommel managed to push the British into Egypt using mostly captured vehicles. Rommel's Afrika Korps was now in Egypt, in El Alamein, only 60 miles west of the British naval base in Alexandria. The Axis powers smelled blood. The Italian troops that had preceded Rommel's German forces in North Africa, only to be beaten back by the British, then saved from complete defeat by the arrival of Rommel, were now back on the winning side, their dwindled numbers having fought alongside the Afrika Korps. Naturally, Benito Mussolini saw this as his opportunity to partake of the victors' spoils. And Hitler anticipated adding Egypt to his empire. But the Allies were not finished. Reinforced by American supplies, and reorganized and reinvigorated by British General Claude Auchinleck, British, Indian, South African, and New Zealand troops battled Rommel, and his by now exhausted men, to a standstill in Egypt. Auchinleck denied the Axis Egypt. Rommel was back on the defensive—a definite turning point in the war in North Africa. Jul 1, 1947: "Mr. X" article appears in Foreign Affairs State Department official George Kennan, using the pseudonym "Mr. X," publishes an article entitled "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" in the July edition of Foreign Affairs. The article focused on Kennan's call for a policy of containment toward the Soviet Union and established the foundation for much of America's early Cold War foreign policy. In February 1946, Kennan, then serving as the U.S. charge d'affaires in Moscow, wrote his famous "long telegram" to the Department of State. In the missive, he condemned the communist leadership of the Soviet Union and called on the United States to forcefully resist Russian expansion. Encouraged by friends and colleagues, Kennan refined the telegram into an article, "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," and secured its publication in the July edition of Foreign Affairs. Kennan signed the article "Mr. X" to avoid any charge that he was presenting official U.S. government policy, but nearly everyone in the Department of State and White House recognized the piece as Kennan's work. In the article, Kennan explained that the Soviet Union's leaders were determined to spread the communist doctrine around the world, but were also extremely patient and pragmatic in pursuing such expansion. In the "face of superior force," Kennan said, the Russians would retreat and wait for a more propitious moment. The West, however, should not be lulled into complacency by temporary Soviet setbacks. Soviet foreign policy, Kennan claimed, "is a fluid stream which moves constantly, wherever it is permitted to move, toward a given goal." In terms of U.S. foreign policy, Kennan's advice was clear: "The main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies." Kennan's article created a sensation in the United States, and the term "containment" instantly entered the Cold War lexicon. The administration of President Harry S. Truman embraced Kennan's philosophy, and in the next few years attempted to "contain" Soviet expansion through a variety of programs, including the establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949. Kennan's star rose quickly in the Department of State and in 1952 he was named U.S. ambassador to Russia. By the 1960s, with the United States hopelessly mired in the Vietnam War, Kennan began to question some of his own basic assumptions in the "Mr. X" article and became a vocal critic of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In particular, he criticized U.S. policymakers during the 1950s and 1960s for putting too much emphasis on the military containment of the Soviet Union, rather than on political and economic programs. Jul 1, 1951: Feller hurls third no-hitter On this day in 1951, Cleveland Indians ace Bob Feller pitches the third no-hit game of his career to lead the Indians over the Detroit Tigers 2-1. This made him the first modern pitcher ever to throw three no-hitters. Feller was born November 3, 1918, in Van Meter, Iowa, and spent much of his childhood practicing pitching against the side of a barn on his family’s farm. At just 16 years old, in July 1935, Feller signed with the Cleveland Indians. On August 25, 1936, when he was still only 17, Feller made his first start, striking out 15 St. Louis Browns with a blazing fastball and knee-buckling curveball that became the hallmarks of his long and storied career. Later that season, Feller struck out 17 Philadelphia Athletics in one game to set an American League record and tie Dizzy Dean’s modern major league record for most strikeouts in a game. Two years later, Feller broke Dean’s record when he struck out 18 Detroit Tigers. The performance set a modern record that stood for 31 years. On opening day in 1940, Feller pitched his first no-hitter--the only no-hitter ever on opening day--to lead his team over the Chicago White Sox. When Feller enlisted in the military at 22, he already had 109 wins, far and away the most ever for a player of his age. Feller returned from World War II in time for the second half of the 1945 season and in 1946, he threw his second no-hitter, this one over the mighty New York Yankees. After a mediocre season in 1950, questions began to surface about Feller’s effectiveness. He answered in 1951, when he started the season with a 10-2 record. On July 1, Feller’s Indians, who were battling the Yankees for the American League pennant, met the Tigers for a doubleheader in Cleveland. Feller started the first game, and, to the dismay of the hometown fans, was unable to establish his signature fastball. Instead, he was forced to rely on his curveballs, sliders and veteran guile. Tiger pitcher Bob Cain was a worthy foe, limiting the Indians to six hits and two runs. The Indians scored one in the first, but then Cain held them in check until the bottom of the eighth. With two outs in the ninth and the Cleveland faithful on their feet in Cleveland Stadium, Feller struck out Vic Wertz, his fifth strikeout of the day, to ring up the third no-hit game of his career. Bob Feller retired from baseball after the 1956 season. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962. Jul 1, 1965: Ball recommends compromise in Vietnam Undersecretary of State George Ball submits a memo to President Lyndon B. Johnson titled "A Compromise Solution for South Vietnam." It began bluntly: "The South Vietnamese are losing the war to the Viet Cong. No one can assure you that we can beat the Viet Cong, or even force them to the conference table on our terms, no matter how many hundred thousand white, foreign (U.S.) troops we deploy." Ball advised that the United States not commit any more troops, restrict the combat role of those already in place, and seek to negotiate a way out of the war. As Ball was submitting his memo, the U.S. air base at Da Nang came under attack by the Viet Cong for the first time. An enemy demolition team infiltrated the airfield and destroyed three planes and damaged three others. One U.S. airman was killed and three U.S. Marines were wounded. The attack on Da Nang, the increased aggressiveness of the Viet Cong, and the weakness of the Saigon regime convinced Johnson that he had to do something to stop the communists or they would soon take over South Vietnam. While Ball recommended a negotiated settlement, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara urged the president to "expand promptly and substantially" the U.S. military presence in South Vietnam. Johnson, not wanting to lose South Vietnam to the communists, ultimately accepted McNamara's recommendation. On July 22, he authorized a total of 44 U.S. battalions for commitment in South Vietnam, a decision that led to a massive escalation of the war. There were less than ten U.S. Army and Marine battalions in South Vietnam at this time. Eventually there would be more than 540,000 U.S. troops in South Vietnam. Jul 1, 1966: Bombing of North Vietnam continues U.S. Air Force and Navy jets carry out a series of raids on fuel installations in the Hanoi-Haiphong area. The Dong Nam fuel dump, 15 miles northeast of Hanoi, with 9 percent of North Vietnam's storage capacity, was struck on this day. The Do Son petroleum installation, 12 miles southeast of Haiphong, would be attacked on July 3. The raids continued for two more days, as petroleum facilities near Haiphong, Thanh Hoa, and Vinh were bombed, and fuel tanks in the Hanoi area were hit. These raids were part of Operation Rolling Thunder, which had begun in March 1965. The attacks on the North Vietnamese fuel facilities represented a new level of bombing, since these sites had been previously off limits. However, the raids did not have a lasting impact because China and the Soviet Union replaced the destroyed petroleum assets fairly quickly. China reacted to these events by calling the bombings "barbarous and wanton acts that have further freed us from any bounds of restrictions in helping North Vietnam." The World Council of Churches in Geneva sent a cable to President Lyndon B. Johnson saying that the latest bombing of North Vietnam was causing a "widespread reaction" of "resentment and alarm" among many Christians. Indian mobs protested the air raids on the Hanoi-Haiphong area with violent anti-American demonstrations in Delhi and several other cities. Jul 1, 1979: The first Sony Walkman goes on sale The transistor radio was a technological marvel that put music literally into consumers' hands in the mid-1950s. It was cheap, it was reliable and it was portable, but it could never even approximate the sound quality of a record being played on a home stereo. It was, however, the only technology available to on-the-go music lovers until the Sony Corporation sparked a revolution in personal electronics with the introduction of the first personal stereo cassette player. A device as astonishing on first encounter as the cellular phone or digital camera would later be, the Sony Walkman went on sale for the very first time on July 1, 1979. The Sony Walkman didn't represent a breakthrough in technology so much as it did a breakthrough in imagination. Every element of the Walkman was already in production or testing as part of some other device when Sony's legendary chairman, Masaru Ibuka, made a special request in early 1979. Ibuka was a music lover who traveled frequently, and he was already in the habit of carrying one of his company's "portable" stereo tape recorders with him on international flights. But the Sony TC-D5 was a heavy device that was in no way portable by modern standards, so Ibuka asked his then-deputy Norio Ohga if he could cobble together something better. Working with the company's existing Pressman product—a portable, monaural tape recorder that was popular with journalists—Ohga had a playback-only stereo device rigged up in time for Ibuka's next trans-Pacific flight. Even though this proto-Walkman required large, earmuff-like headphones and custom-made batteries (which, of course, ran out on Ibuka midway through his flight), it impressed the Sony chairman tremendously with its sound quality and portability. Many objections were raised internally when Ibuka began his push to create a marketable version of the device, the biggest of which was conceptual: Would anyone actually buy a cassette device that was not for recording but only for playback? Ibuka's simple response—"Don't you think a stereo cassette player that you can listen to while walking around is a good idea?"—proved to be one of the great understatements in business history. After a breakneck development phase of only four months, Sony engineers had a reliable product ready for market at 30,000 Yen (approximately US$150 in 1979 dollars) and available before the start of summer vacation for Japanese students—both critical targets established at the outset of development. The initial production run of 30,000 units looked to be too ambitious after one month of lackluster sales (only 3,000 were sold in July 1979). But after an innovative consumer-marketing campaign in which Sony representatives simply approached pedestrians on the streets of Tokyo and gave them a chance to listen to the Walkman, the product took off, selling out available stocks before the end of August and signaling the beginning of one of Sony's greatest success stories. Jul 1, 1997: Hong Kong returned to China At midnight on July 1, 1997, Hong Kong reverts back to Chinese rule in a ceremony attended by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Prince Charles of Wales, Chinese President Jiang Zemin, and U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. A few thousand Hong Kongers protested the turnover, which was otherwise celebratory and peaceful. In 1839, Britain invaded China to crush opposition to its interference in the country's economic, social, and political affairs. One of Britain's first acts of the war was to occupy Hong Kong, a sparsely inhabited island off the coast of southeast China. In 1841, China ceded the island to the British with the signing of the Convention of Chuenpi, and in 1842 the Treaty of Nanking was signed, formally ending the First Opium War. Britain's new colony flourished as an East-West trading center and as the commercial gateway and distribution center for southern China. In 1898, Britain was granted an additional 99 years of rule over Hong Kong under the Second Convention of Peking. In September 1984, after years of negotiations, the British and the Chinese signed a formal agreement approving the 1997 turnover of the island in exchange for a Chinese pledge to preserve Hong Kong's capitalist system. On July 1, 1997, Hong Kong was peaceably handed over to China in a ceremony attended by numerous Chinese, British, and international dignitaries. The chief executive under the new Hong Kong government, Tung Chee Hwa, formulated a policy based on the concept of "one country, two systems," thus preserving Hong Kong's role as a principal capitalist center in Asia.
01 July Deaths 552 – Totila, Ostrogoth king 1109 – Alfonso VI of León and Castile (b. 1040) 1277 – Baibars, Egyptian sultan (b. 1223) 1589 – Lady Saigō, Japanese wife of Tokugawa Ieyasu (b. 1552) 1592 – Marc'Antonio Ingegneri, Italian composer (b. 1535) 1614 – Isaac Casaubon, French philologist and scholar (b. 1559) 1622 – William Parker, 4th Baron Monteagle, English politician (b. 1575) 1681 – Oliver Plunkett, Irish archbishop and saint (b. 1629) 1774 – Henry Fox, 1st Baron Holland, English politician, Secretary of State for the Southern Department (b. 1705) 1782 – Charles Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, English politician, Prime Minister of Great Britain (b. 1730) 1784 – Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, German composer (b. 1710) 1787 – Charles, Prince of Soubise (b. 1715) 1819 – Jemima Wilkinson, American evangelist (b. 1752) 1839 – Mahmud II, Ottoman sultan (b. 1785) 1860 – Charles Goodyear, American engineer (b. 1800) 1863 – John F. Reynolds, American general (b. 1820) 1884 – Allan Pinkerton, Scottish-American detective and spy (b. 1819) 1896 – Harriet Beecher Stowe, American author and activist (b. 1811) 1905 – John Hay, American journalist and politician, 37th United States Secretary of State (b. 1838) 1925 – Erik Satie, French pianist and composer (b. 1866) 1942 – Peadar Toner Mac Fhionnlaoich, Irish author and poet (b. 1857) 1944 – Carl Mayer, Austrian screenwriter (b. 1894) 1944 – Tanya Savicheva, Russian author (b. 1930) 1948 – Achille Varzi, Italian race car driver (b. 1904) 1950 – Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, Swiss composer and educator (b. 1865) 1950 – Eliel Saarinen, Finnish-American architect, co-designed the National Museum of Finland (b. 1873) 1958 – Scott Leary, American swimmer (b. 1881) 1961 – Louis-Ferdinand Céline, French physician and author (b. 1894) 1962 – Purushottam Das Tandon, Indian politician (b. 1882) 1962 – Bidhan Chandra Roy, Indian physician and politician, 2nd Chief Minister of West Bengal (b. 1882) 1964 – Pierre Monteux, French-American viola player and conductor (b. 1875) 1965 – Wally Hammond, English cricketer (b. 1903) 1965 – Robert Ruark, American journalist and author (b. 1915) 1966 – Frank Verner, American runner (b. 1883) 1967 – Gerhard Ritter, German historian and academic (b. 1888) 1968 – Fritz Bauer, German judge and politician (b. 1903) 1971 – William Lawrence Bragg, Australian-English physicist, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1890) 1971 – Learie Constantine, Trinidadian-English cricketer and politician (b. 1901) 1974 – Juan Perón, Argentinian general and politician, President of Argentina (b. 1895) 1976 – Anneliese Michel, German woman believed to be possessed by demons (b. 1952) 1978 – Kurt Student, German general and pilot (b. 1890) 1981 – Carlos de Oliveira, Portuguese author and poet (b. 1921) 1981 – Rushton Moreve, American bass player and songwriter (Steppenwolf) (b. 1948) 1983 – Buckminster Fuller, American architect, designed the Montreal Biosphère (b. 1895) 1984 – Moshé Feldenkrais, Ukrainian-Israeli physicist and educator (b. 1904) 1987 – Snakefinger, English singer-songwriter and guitarist (The Residents and Chilli Willi and the Red Hot Peppers) (b. 1949) 1991 – Michael Landon, American actor, director, and producer (b. 1936) 1992 – Franco Cristaldi, Italian screenwriter and producer (b. 1924) 1994 – Merriam Modell, American author (b. 1908) 1995 – Wolfman Jack, American radio host (b. 1938) 1995 – Ian Parkin, English guitarist (Be-Bop Deluxe) (b. 1950) 1996 – William T. Cahill, American politician, 46th Governor of New Jersey (b. 1904) 1996 – Margaux Hemingway, American actress and model (b. 1954) 1996 – Steve Tesich, Serbian-American author and screenwriter (b. 1942) 1997 – Robert Mitchum, American actor and singer (b. 1917) 1997 – Charles Werner, American cartoonist (b. 1909) 1999 – Edward Dmytryk, Canadian-American director and producer (b. 1908) 1999 – Forrest Mars, Sr., American businessman, created M&M's and the Mars bar (b. 1904) 1999 – Guy Mitchell, American singer (b. 1927) 1999 – Sylvia Sidney, American actress (b. 1910) 2000 – Walter Matthau, American actor and singer (b. 1920) 2001 – Nikolay Basov, Russian physicist and educator, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1922) 2003 – Herbie Mann, American flute player and saxophonist (b. 1930) 2003 – Wesley Mouzon, American boxer (b. 1927) 2003 – N!xau ǂToma, Namibian actor (b. 1944) 2004 – Peter Barnes, English playwright and screenwriter (b. 1931) 2004 – Marlon Brando, American actor (b. 1924) 2004 – Todor Skalovski, Macedonian composer and conductor (b. 1909) 2005 – Renaldo Benson, American singer-songwriter (Four Tops) (b. 1936) 2005 – Gus Bodnar, Canadian ice hockey player and coach (b. 1923) 2005 – Luther Vandross, American singer-songwriter and producer (Change) (b. 1951) 2006 – Ryutaro Hashimoto, Japanese politician, 53rd Prime Minister of Japan (b. 1937) 2006 – Robert Lepikson, Estonian race car driver and politician, Estonian Minister of the Interior (b. 1952) 2006 – Fred Trueman, English cricketer and sportscaster (b. 1931) 2008 – Mel Galley, English guitarist (Whitesnake, Trapeze, Finders Keepers, and Phenomena) (b. 1948) 2008 – Mark Dean Schwab, American rapist and murderer (b. 1968) 2009 – Alexis Argüello, Nicaraguan boxer and politician (b. 1952) 2009 – Karl Malden, American actor and singer (b. 1912) 2009 – Onni Palaste, Finnish soldier and author (b. 1917) 2009 – Mollie Sugden, English actress (b. 1922) 2010 – Don Coryell, American football player and coach (b. 1924) 2010 – Arnold Friberg, American painter and illustrator (b. 1913) 2010 – Geoffrey Hutchings, English actor (b. 1939) 2010 – Ilene Woods, American actress and singer (b. 1929) 2011 – Leslie Brooks, American actress and singer (b. 1922) 2012 – Peter E. Gillquist, American priest and author (b. 1938) 2012 – Mike Hershberger, American baseball player (b. 1939) 2012 – Ossie Hibbert, Jamaican-American keyboard player and producer (The Aggrovators and The Revolutionaries) (b. 1950) 2012 – Evelyn Lear, American soprano and actress (b. 1926) 2012 – Alan G. Poindexter, American captain, pilot, and astronaut (b. 1961) 2012 – Jack Richardson, American author and playwright (b. 1934) 2013 – Sidney Bryan Berry, American general (b. 1926) 2013 – Texas Johnny Brown, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (b. 1928) 2013 – Victor Engström, Swedish Bandy player (b. 1989) 2013 – Charles Foley, American game designer, co-created Twister (b. 1930) 2013 – William H. Gray, American politician (b. 1941) 2013 – Paul Jenkins, American actor (b. 1938) 2013 – Gary Shearston, Australian singer-songwriter (b. 1939) 2013 – Maureen Waaka, New Zealand model and politician, Miss New Zealand 1962 (b. 1943) 2014 – Stephen Gaskin, American activist, co-founded The Farm (b. 1935) 2014 – Bob Jones, English politician (b. 1955) 2014 – Anatoly Kornukov, Ukrainian-Russian general (b. 1942) 2014 – Jean Garon, Canadian politician, (b. 1938) H
Jul 1, 2002: Two planes collide over Germany A Russian Tupolev 154 collides in midair with a Boeing 757 cargo plane over southern Germany on this day in 2002. The 69 passengers and crew on the Russian plane and the two-person cargo crew were all killed. The collision occurred even though each plane had TCAS (Traffic Collision Avoidance System) collision-avoidance equipment onboard and everything functioned correctly. The Bashkirian Airlines plane was carrying 45 young students from Russia to a resort near Barcelona in Spain for a summer vacation. DHL International, the express delivery company, owned the cargo jet, which was headed from Bahrain to Brussels. The planes were both on their planned flight paths that evening, flying with their lights off in the dark, according to regulation. About 45 seconds before the crash, with each plane traveling at 35,000 feet, the TCAS system in each plane indicated to the pilots that they should change their altitude. The Boeing cargo jet was to descend and the Tupolev was supposed to rise. However, a Swiss air-traffic controller ordered the Tupolev pilot to descend as well. As directed, both planes lowered their altitudes at the same time; they crashed in mid-air over Ueberlingen, Germany, very close to the Swiss border. There were no survivors of the fiery crash, which caused debris to scatter over a 20-mile radius. Residents of the area heard the thunderous impact, but no one on the ground was killed. Swiss aviation officials immediately began blaming the Russian pilots for the tragedy, but the evidence soon showed their charges to be baseless. The pilots were experienced and the plane and its collision-avoidance system were in fine working order. Instead, it was the Swiss air-traffic system that appeared to be faulty. Their own collision-avoidance system was not in operation and they had only one controller on duty at the time. Jul 1, 2003: Kobe Bryant accuser goes to police A female employee at a Colorado resort goes to police to file sexual misconduct charges against basketball star Kobe Bryant on this day in 2003. A few days later, an arrest warrant was issued for Bryant, and the ensuing case generated a media frenzy. On the night of June 30, 2003, Bryant checked into the Lodge and Spa in Cordillera, located in Edwards, Colorado, near Vail. The 24-year-old Los Angeles Lakers guard was scheduled to have knee surgery the following day. A 19-year-old employee at the resort agreed to show Bryant around and he later invited her to his room. The two reportedly flirted and kissed; however, the accuser claimed that when she decided to leave, Bryant became upset and sexually assaulted her. The following day, July 1, she went to the police to file a complaint. Bryant was questioned by the authorities and provided a DNA sample. On July 3, an arrest warrant was issued for the basketball phenom, who the next day turned himself in to authorities in Eagle County, Colorado, and was released on $25,000 bail. On July 18, with his wife by his side, Bryant held a news conference in which he admitted to having sex with the accuser but maintained it was consensual. Bryant, who was drafted into the NBA after high school in 1996, went on to play for the Lakers during the 2003-2004 season, but faced intense scrutiny and lost many of his endorsement deals as a result of the rape case. The accuser, whose identity was mistakenly made public as a result of court clerical errors, endured media speculation about her personal life and received death threats. On September 1, 2004, after jury selection had begun, the district attorney dropped the rape charge against Bryant because the accuser decided not to testify or participate in the trial. In early March 2005, Bryant and the accuser settled her civil lawsuit against him for an undisclosed sum. Jul 1, 2005: Last Ford Thunderbird produced The last Thunderbird, Ford Motor Company's iconic sports car, emerges from a Ford factory in Wixom, Michigan on this day in 2005. Ford began its development of the Thunderbird in the years following World War II, during which American servicemen had the opportunity to observe sleek European sports cars. General Motors built the first American sports car: the Chevrolet Corvette, released in 1953. The undeniably sleek Corvette's initial engine performance was relatively underwhelming, but it was gaining lots of attention from the press and public, and Ford was motivated to respond, rushing the Thunderbird to the market in 1955. The 1955 Thunderbird was an immediate hit, selling more than 14,000 that year (compared to just 700 Corvettes). The success of the Thunderbird led Chevrolet to continue production of (and improve upon) the Corvette, which soon became a tough competitor in the sports car market. In addition to the powerful V-8 engine that Ford was known for, the Thunderbird boasted all the conveniences consumers had become accustomed to, including a removable hard convertible top, soundproofing and the accessories standard to most Ford cars. In 1958, to satisfy critics who thought the T-Bird was too small, Ford released a four-seater version with a roomier trunk and bucket seats. The Beach Boys elevated the Thunderbird to pop- culture-icon status in 1964 by including it in the lyrics of their hit single "Fun Fun Fun" ("she'll have fun, fun, fun 'til her daddy takes the T-Bird away"). By that time, President John F. Kennedy had already included 50 Thunderbirds in his inaugural procession in 1961, and a T-Bird would also feature prominently in the 1973 film "American Graffiti." Thunderbird sales slowed during the 1990s, and Ford discontinued the Thunderbird in 1997. In 2002, however, in an attempt to capitalize on car buyers' nostalgia, the company launched production of a retro T-Bird, a two-seater convertible that took some of its styling from the original classic. The luxury retailer Neiman Marcus offered an early special edition version in their 2000 Christmas catalog, priced at just under $42,000; their stock of 200 sold out in two hours and 15 minutes. Despite brisk early sales and good reviews, sales of the new Thunderbird couldn't justify continued production, and Ford discontinued it again in mid-2005.
02 July Events 437 – Emperor Valentinian III, begins his reign over the Western Roman Empire. His mother Galla Placidia ends her regency, but continues to exercise political influence at the court in Rome. 626 – Li Shimin, the future Emperor Taizong of Tang, ambushes and kills his rival brothers Li Yuanji and Li Jiancheng in the Xuanwu Gate Incident. 706 – In China, Emperor Zhongzong of Tang inters the bodies of relatives in the Qianling Mausoleum, located on Mount Liang outside Chang'an. 963 – The imperial army proclaims Nicephorus Phocas Emperor of the Romans on the plains outside Cappadocian Caesarea. 1298 – The Battle of Göllheim is fought between Albert I of Habsburg and Adolf of Nassau-Weilburg. 1494 – The Treaty of Tordesillas is ratified by Spain. 1504 – Bogdan III the One-Eyed becomes Voivode of Moldavia. 1555 – The Ottoman Admiral Turgut Reis sacks the Italian city of Paola. 1561 – Menas, Emperor of Ethiopia, defeats a revolt in Emfraz. 1582 – Battle of Yamazaki: Toyotomi Hideyoshi defeats Akechi Mitsuhide. 1613 – The first English expedition from Massachusetts against Acadia led by Samuel Argall takes place. 1644 – English Civil War: Battle of Marston Moor. 1679 – Europeans first visit Minnesota and see headwaters of Mississippi in an expedition led by Daniel Greysolon de Du Luth. 1698 – Thomas Savery patents the first steam engine. 1776 – The Continental Congress adopts a resolution severing ties with the Kingdom of Great Britain although the wording of the formal Declaration of Independence is not approved until July 4. 1777 – Vermont becomes the first American territory to abolish slavery. 1822 – Thirty-five slaves are hanged in South Carolina, including Denmark Vesey, after being accused of organizing a slave rebellion. 1823 – Bahia Independence Day: The end of Portuguese rule in Brazil, with the final defeat of the Portuguese crown loyalists in the province of Bahia. 1839 – Twenty miles off the coast of Cuba, 53 rebelling African slaves led by Joseph Cinqué take over the slave ship Amistad. 1853 – The Russian Army crossed the Pruth river into the Danubian Principalities, Moldavia and Wallachia—providing the spark that set off the Crimean War. 1871 – Victor Emmanuel II of Italy enters Rome after having conquered it from the Papal States. 1881 – Charles J. Guiteau shoots and fatally wounds U.S. President James Garfield, who eventually dies from an infection on September 19. 1890 – The U.S. Congress passes the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. 1897 – Italian scientist Guglielmo Marconi obtains a patent for radio in London. 1900 – The first Zeppelin flight takes place on Lake Constance near Friedrichshafen, Germany. 1917 – The East St. Louis Riots end. 1921 – World War I: U.S. President Warren G. Harding signs the Knox–Porter Resolution formally ending the war between the United States and Imperial Germany. 1934 – The Night of the Long Knives ends with the death of Ernst Röhm. 1937 – Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan are last heard from over the Pacific Ocean while attempting to make the first equatorial round-the-world flight. 1940 – Indian independence leader Subhas Chandra Bose is arrested and detained in Calcutta. 1950 – The Golden Pavilion at Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto, Japan burns down. 1962 – The first Wal-Mart store opens for business in Rogers, Arkansas. 1964 – U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964 meant to prohibit segregation in public places. 1966 – The French military explodes a nuclear test bomb codenamed Aldébaran in Mururoa, their first nuclear test in the Pacific. 1976 – Fall of the Republic of Vietnam; Communist North Vietnam declares their union to form the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. 1986 – Rodrigo Rojas and Carmen Gloria Quintana were burnt alive during a street demonstration against the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile. 2000 – Vicente Fox Quesada is elected the first President of México from an opposition party, the Partido Acción Nacional, after more than 70 years of continuous rule by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. 2001 – The AbioCor self-contained artificial heart is first implanted. 2002 – Steve Fossett becomes the first person to fly solo around the world nonstop in a balloon. 2005 – The Live 8 benefit concerts takes place in the G8 states and in South Africa, More than 1,000 musicians performed and are broadcast on 182 television networks and 2,000 radio networks. B
