1861 – Confederate states’ congress began holding sessions in Richmond, Virginia.
1868 – 1st use of tax stamps on cigarettes.
1890 – Snow and hail in Calais, Maine.
1907 – A train wreck on the Pere Marquette Railroad near Salem, Michigan kills thirty and injures seventy more.
1917 – WWI draft lottery held; #258 is 1st drawn.
1921 – Congresswoman Alice Mary Robertson becomes the first woman to preside over the floor of US House of Representatives.
1926 – A convention of the Methodist Church votes to allow women to become priests.
1934 – 118 degrees F, Keokuk, Iowa (state record)
1942 – 1st detachment of Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, begin basic training.
1944 – US President FDR nominated for an unprecedented 4th term at Democratic convention.
1960 – 1st submerged submarine to fire Polaris missile (George Washington)
1964 – 1st surfin’ record to go #1-Jan & Dean’s “Surf City”
1969 – Apollo 11 lunar module carrying Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins lands on the surface of the Moon; Aldrin and Armstrong walk on the moon seven hours later.
1973 – The US Senate passes the War Powers Act.
1976 – Vietnam War: The US military completes its troop withdrawal from Thailand.
1989 – 93 degrees F, highest overnight low ever recorded in Phoenix, Arizona.
1990 – Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. resigns from the Supreme Court after 36 years.
1995 – The Regents of the University of California vote to end all affirmative action in the UC system by 1997.
1998 – Two hundred aid workers from CARE International, Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) and other aid groups leave Afghanistan on orders of the Taliban.
2017 – Elon Musk tweets he has “verbal government approval” to build 29 minute Hyperloop between New York and Washington, D.C.