Category: Today

On July 14, 1789, Paris citizens stormed the Bastille.

The word “storm” in its various forms is almost invariably paired with “Bastille” in discussions of the event. It is one of the great clichés of history.

---

On the same date nine years later, in America, the Sedition Act was signed into law, prohibiting the writing, publishing, or speaking false or malicious statements about the United States government.

The passage of this repressive law spurred the formation of the first opposition party in the United States, with Thomas Jefferson as its leader and figurehead.

On July 13, 1973, the minority (Republican) counsel on the Senate Watergate investigative committee, Donald Sanders, asked Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield if he knew of any recordings made in the Nixon White House, and Butterfield responded, “everything was taped” at least while Nixon was in attendance, and that “there was not so much as a hint that something should not be taped.”

This revelation of the Nixon Tapes transformed the Watergate scandal into a major legal as well as political event; with the court-forced disclosure of the tapes, it proved to be one of the most striking examples of “government transparency” in modern times.

On July 12, 1817, American poet, abolitionist, businessman, and Transcendentalist philosopher Henry David Thoreau was born. He is perhaps best known, today, for his book of meditations on the simple life, Walden, and his influential essay on civil disobedience.

A few hundred years ago, not far from Deas’ Point near Weehawken, New Jersey, was a ledge eleven paces wide and 20 paces long, situated 20 feet above the Hudson on the Palisades. This ledge, long gone, was the site of 18 documented duels and probably many unrecorded ones in the years 1798–1845. The most famous is the duel between General Alexander Hamilton, first Secretary of the Treasury, and Colonel Aaron Burr, third (and sitting) Vice President of the United States, which took place on July 11, 1804.

Hamilton died the next day of complications from a bullet wound at less than 50 years of age; Burr died on September 14, 32 years later at age 80.

On July 10, 1832, U.S. President Andrew Jackson vetoed a bill to re-charter the Second Bank of the United States, in effect ending formal central banking in the United States until the establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913.

On July 9, 1776, General George Washington had the Declaration of Independence read out to members of the Continental Army in Manhattan. Meanwhile, thousands of British troops on Staten Island prepare for the Battle of Long Island.

July 8, 1776 – Church bells (possibly including the Liberty Bell, pictured) were rung after John Nixon delivered the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence of the United States.

In 1456, a retrial verdict acquitted Joan of Arc of heresy 25 years after her execution.

In 1928 on July 7, sliced bread was sold for the first time by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri.

On this date in 1958, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Alaska Statehood Act into law.

July 6 serves better as a “Today in Tyranny” marker than anything positive, at least when you consider these events:

• 1415 – Jan Hus was burnt at the stake.
• 1535 – Sir Thomas More was executed for treason against King Henry VIII of England.
• 1887 – David Kalakaua, monarch of the Kingdom of Hawaii, was forced at gunpoint by Americans to sign the Bayonet Constitution giving Americans more power in Hawaii while stripping Hawaiian citizens of their rights.
• 1939 – The Nazi “Third Reich” closed the last remaining Jewish enterprises in Germany.

The Liberty Bell left Philadelphia by special train on its way to the Panama–Pacific International Exposition, on July 5, 1915 — the last trip outside Philadelphia that the custodians of the bell intend to permit.

In 1937 on this date, Spam, the luncheon meat, was introduced into the market by the Hormel Foods Corporation.

The Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution, lowering the voting age from 21 to 18 years, was formally certified by President Richard Nixon on July 5, 1971.

On July 5, 1995, Armenia (flag, above) adopted its constitution, four years after the country’s independence from the Soviet Union.