July 10
1925: Jury selection began in Dayton, Tennessee, in the trial of John T. Scopes, charged with teaching Darwin’s Theory of Evolution.
1940: The Battle of Britain began as the German Luftwaffe launched attacks on southern England during World War II.
1962: NASA launched Telstar 1, the first active communications satellite.
July 11
1798: The U.S. Marine Corps was formally re-established by congressional act, which also created the U.S. Marine Band.
1804: Vice President Aaron Burr mortally wounded Alexander Hamilton in a duel in Weehawken, New Jersey.
1859: Big Ben, the great bell inside London’s famous clock tower, chimed for the first time.
1914: Babe Ruth made his Major League debut, pitching the Boston Red Sox to a 4–3 win over Cleveland.
1960: Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird was published.
July 12
1543: England’s King Henry VIII married his sixth and final wife, Catherine Parr.
1862: President Abraham Lincoln signed a bill authorizing the Army Medal of Honor during the Civil War.
1962: The Rolling Stones played their first show at the Marquee Club in London.
July 13
1923: A sign consisting of 50-foot-tall letters spelling out “HOLLYWOODLAND” was dedicated in the Hollywood Hills to promote a subdivision. (The last four letters were removed in 1949.)
1930: The first FIFA World Cup began in Uruguay.
1985: The “Live Aid” benefit rock concerts were held simultaneously in London and Philadelphia, raising millions for famine relief in Ethiopia.
July 14
1789: In an event symbolizing the start of the French Revolution, citizens of Paris stormed the Bastille prison and released the seven prisoners inside.
1798: President John Adams signed the Sedition Act into law, making it a federal crime to publish false, scandalous or malicious writing about the United States government.
1881: Outlaw William H. Bonney Jr., alias “Billy the Kid,” was shot and killed by Sheriff Pat Garrett in Fort Sumner in present-day New Mexico.
1912: American folk singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie was born in Okemah, Oklahoma.
July 15
1799: The Rosetta Stone, a key to deciphering ancient Egyptian scripts, was found at Fort Julien in the Nile Delta during the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt.
1834: The Spanish Inquisition was abolished more than 350 years after its creation.
1916: The Boeing Company, originally known as Pacific Aero Products Co., was founded in Seattle.
1997: Fashion designer Gianni Versace, 50, was shot dead outside his Miami Beach home by Andrew Phillip Cunanan, 27.
July 16
1945: The United States exploded its first experimental atomic bomb in the desert of Alamogordo, New Mexico.
1951: The novel The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger was first published by Little, Brown and Co.
1957: Marine Corps Maj. John Glenn set a transcontinental speed record by flying a Vought F8U Crusader jet from California to New York in 3 hours, 23 minutes and 8.4 seconds.
1969: Apollo 11 blasted off from Cape Kennedy on the first manned mission to the surface of the moon.
