On July 31, 1703, Daniel Defoe — who would later become famous as the author of Robinson Crusoe and other literary works — was placed in a pillory for the crime of seditious libel. The sedition pertained to a satirical pamphlet he had published, “The Shortest-Way with the Dissenters; Or, Proposals for the Establishment of the Church.” The mob pelted him with flowers.
On July 30, 1619, the first representative assembly in the Americas, the House of Burgesses, convened for the first time in Jamestown, Virginia.
About a month later, a group of “twenty and odd” captives from what is now Angola landed in Hampton; this is what most Americans, today, refer to as the significant event in American history for the year “1619.”
On the same late day in July, 1676, Nathaniel Bacon issued the “Declaration of the People of Virginia,” beginning Bacon’s Rebellion against the rule of Governor William Berkeley.
King Umberto I of Italy was assassinated by the anarchist Gaetano Bresci on July 29, 1900. After shooting the monarch multiple times, Breschi was wrestled to the ground and almost lynched. Upon his arrest, he said “I did not kill Umberto. I have killed the King. I killed a principle.” This did not prove immediately true, for Umberto’s 31-year-old son, Victor Emmanuel III, succeeded his father to the throne. What Bresci spawned was the terrorist craze of anarchists trying to kill heads of state and captains of industry, itself a kind of self-defeating principle, since the peoples of the world turned decidedly against the anarchists.
July 28, 1868, is the official date for the certification of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.
Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.
Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
The first U.S. federal government agency, the Department of Foreign Affairs, was established in 1789. Congress had voted for it on the 21st of July, and newly elected President George Washington signed it into law on July 27.
In September it was renamed Department of State. Thomas Jefferson was appointed its first Secretary, and under his leadership the department comprised only six personnel, two diplomatic posts (in London and Paris), and ten consular posts.
On July 26, 1533, Francisco Pizarro’s Spanish conquistadors strangled to death Atahualpa, the 13th and last emperor of the Incas, thereby ending 300 years of Inca civilization. The conquistadors were greedy and murderous, but the Inca civilization, arguably, was worse: totalitarian and radically inegalitarian.
But they made great high-mountain roads.
Arguments about infrastructure promoted by Big Government continue to this very day. And it is quite possible that an earlier civilization made the roadways, which the Inca merely renovated.
On July 25, 1861, the U.S. Congress passed the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution, stating that the war with the seceded states — those of the then-recent Confederacy — was being fought to preserve the Union, not to end slavery.
In December, Congress attempted to reaffirm the resolution, but it failed after a motion advanced by abolitionist Representative Thaddeus Stevens (R-Penn.).
On July 24, 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court told President Richard Nixon that he lacked constitutional authority to withhold the infamous “Nixon Tapes” from Congress.
On July 24, 1487, citizens in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, went on strike against a ban on foreign beer.
On the same day of 1823’s calendar, slavery was abolished in Chile.
July 24 serves as Pioneer Day in Utah and as Simón Bolívar Day in Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela.
After pro-democracy protests, General Ne Win resigned as leader of the Socialist Republic of the Union of Burma’s only legal political party on July 23, 1988.
On this day in 1903, the Ford Motor Company sold its first car.
Less than 30 years later, Aldous Huxley satirized Ford’s assembly line procedures in his novel Brave New World. Arguably, both the assembly line and the satire advanced freedom.
Today is July 23, A.F. 162. The “A.F.” is not what “af” means in popular online abbreviation, but “in the Year of Our Ford” — “After Ford,” specifically.