The People History Home

July 1st to 30th

Just a few news items from each day in July click on the link for each day to find more news for that day

1st July

1956 Congress passes the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act for the construction of 41,000 miles of Interstate Highways over a 20-year period

1963 Zip Code Introduced in the United States

1994 The PLO leader Yasser Arafat, has returned to Palestine after 27 years in exile.

1997 The Colonial flag of Hong Kong is lowered for the last time prior to hand over to China

2nd July

1937 Amelia Earhart Goes Missing

1964 The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is signed into law by President Johnson.

2005 Live 8 concerts happen in members of the G8 cities around the world and South Africa

3rd July

1998 Rolls Royce Sold To Volkswagen

4th July

1776 United States Declaration of Independence Signed

1946 The Philippines became a self-governing nation after 48 years of U.S. sovereignty

1954 Rationing of meat and bacon through the use of ration books ends bringing to an end rationing in Great Britain after 14 years

1959 A 49th star is added to the American flag to represent the new state of Alaska

1960 A 50th star is added to the American flag to represent the new state of Hawaii

5th July

1946 The Bikini swimsuit ( a daring 2 piece swimming costume for ladies ) was introduced by French designer Louis Reard at a popular swimming pool in Paris.

1981 Riots in Toxteth, Liverpool

1996 The first cloning of an animal by scientists was revealed by the Roslin Institute in Scotland when DOLLY THE SHEEP was cloned from tissue taken from a 6 year old ewe's udder.

6th July

1942 Anne Frank and her family take refuge in a secret sealed-off area of an Amsterdam warehouse to escape being sent to Nazi concentration camps

1952 The last of the trams in London ends it's journey ending nearly 100 years of trams in London

7th July

1930 Construction begins on the Hoover Dam in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River

2007 Seven Wonders of the Modern World Announced

Born in July

Yul Brynner

Born: July 11th, 1920, Vladivostok, Russia

Forest Whitaker

Born: July 15th, 1961, Longview, Texas

Vin Diesel

Born: Mark Sinclair Vincent, July 18th, 1967, New York City

Matt LeBlanc

Born: July 25th, 1967, Newton, Massachussetts

Mick Jagger

Born: July 26th, 1943, Dartford, England

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Born: July 30th, 1947, Thal, Austria

Tom Cruise

Born: Thomas Cruise Mapother IV, July 3rd, 1962, Syracuse, New York

8th July

1889 The Wall Street Journal is first published

1947 The Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) issue a press release stating that personnel had recovered a crashed "flying disc" from a ranch near Roswell

9th July

1941 Enigma Code Broken

1984 A 760-year-old wing of York Minster, the largest medieval cathedral in Britain, was gutted by fire

1999 Pete Sampras wins in three straight sets beating Andre Agassi for his sixth Men's Wimbledon title in seven years and beating the previous record of Bjorn Borg.

10th July

1925 John T. Scopes Trial Begins ( Butler Act, which made it illegal to teach evolution in Tennessee schools )

1940 The Germans Luftwaffe begin bombing raids against Great Britain

1985 The Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior is sunk when French agents plant a bomb on the hull of the boat

11th July

1955 President Eisenhower signed a bill requiring use of the inscription 'In God We Trust' on all paper money.

1985 The Coca Cola company makes one of worst decisions in marketing history when it decides to change it's original formula and introduces "New Coke"

2008 Oil hits an all time high of $147 a barrel following further missile testing by Iran in the middle east and concerns over oil supplies should tensions increase further between Iran and Israel over Iran's Nuclear program.

12th July

1967 Race Riots began in Newark, New Jersey, after a black cab driver was arrested and beaten by police.

2008 IndyMac Bank Collapse

13th July

1977 A lightening strike strikes a substation on the Hudson River, tripping two circuit breakers in Westchester County, then a second lightning strike caused the loss of two 345,000 volt transmission lines causing a 25hrs blackout of the New York City area.

1985 The Live Aid Concert was a series of rock concerts held to raise funds for famine relief in Ethiopia around the world in cites including London, Philadelphia, Sydney and Moscow.

1995 A heat wave that effects Illinois and Wisconsin starts when a heat advisory is issued in Chicago, Illinois, warning of an impending record-breaking heat wave. By the time the heat wave ends one week later, nearly 2,000 people are dead in Illinois and Wisconsin with temperatures being recorded in Chicago up to 106 degrees Fahrenheit.

14th July

1966 In one of the worst murder cases to date 8 student nurses are brutally murdered by Richard Speck at their group residence in Chicago, Illinois.

15th July

1933 Hundreds of thousands of Chinese peasants are homeless due to the Yellow River overrunning it's dykes and flooding thousands of acres of land. Famine is now also affecting these men, women and children and hundreds are now dying from starvation.

1976 School Bus Kidnapped Chowchilla, California

1997 Gianni Versace Murdered

100 years of price Change

100 Years Of Price Changes

We spent many hours researching cost of living information for each year and I created this page after being asked a number of times about why I did not include current prices alongside our cost of living information for each year and thought this was the easiest way to make the information available. Includes Average Cost of New Home, Average Wages, New Car cost, Gallon of Gas, and a 1 lb Hamburger Meat, 1920 to 2023.

16th July

1969 Apollo 11 astronauts were launched into space on a Saturn 5 rocket launched from Cape Kennedy at 9:32 a.m. hoping to be the first men to land on the moon. )

2004 Martha Stewart is sentenced to five months in prison and a two year period of supervised release (to include five months of home confinement) by a federal judge in New York for conspiracy, obstruction of an agency proceeding, and making false statements to federal investigators.

17th July

1954 "Operation Wetback" is launched by the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to remove about four million illegal immigrants from the southwestern United States, with a focus on Mexican nationals. The operation began in California and Arizona sweeping northward through agricultural areas with a goal of 1,000 apprehensions a day.

1955 Disneyland in Anaheim, California opens to invited guests only. More than 30,000 guests showed up to participate in one of the largest theme parks in the world at the time

1981 Hyatt Regency Hotel Bridge Collapse Kansas City

1997 F.W. Woolworth's, the original five-and-dime store that started in 1879, announced today that its last 400 stores would close.

18th July

1925 Nazi leader Adolf Hitler publishes the first volume of his personal manifesto, Mein Kampf which was a bitter and turgid narrative filled with anti-Semitic outpourings, disdain for morality, worship of power, and the blueprints for his plan of Nazi world domination.

1936 The Spanish Civil War starts as a revolt by right wing Spanish military officers in Morocco which spreads to mainland Spain.

1969 A car driven by Senator Edward "Ted" Kennedy plunged off a narrow wooden bridge into a tidal pond after leaving a party on Chappaquiddick Island

1976 The first perfect 10 ever recorded in Olympic gymnastics was achieved up by Romania's 4-foot-11, 88-pound Nadia Comaneci on the women's uneven parallel bars.

19th July

1923 Insulin Introduced.

1935 The first parking meter in the U.S. the Park-O-Meter invented by Carlton Magee, was installed in Oklahoma City by the Dual Parking Meter Company.br />

1991 Mike Tyson is accused of the rape of Desiree Washington, a contestant in the Miss Black America pageant

20th July

1923 Francisco Villa ( Pancho Villa ) is assassinated in Parral, Chihuahua, in his car and the assassins were never arrested.

1964 Violence has flared up again in Harlem New York during burial services for those killed during the earlier riots with 14 more hurt. African-American leaders in the community are urging calm but hooligans are continuing to cause damage to property in the area..

1969 The Apollo 11 astronauts made history when the first man is landed on the moon by the United States and Neil Armstrong and Edwin 'Buzz' Aldrin became the first humans to set foot on the Moon leaving the first human footprints in its dusty soil.

1980 The Moscow Summer Olympics begins minus the United States and 64 other countries who were boycotting the games because of the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan.

21st July

1931 In the city of Chicago which has one of the most modern Opera Houses in the US, can not pay it's 14,000 teachers their salaries due to running out of money

2002 Worldcom files for bankruptcy protection

2005 Terrorist Attack London Underground

22nd July

1934 John Dillinger Public Enemy number ONE career was finally ended during a shoot out with FBI agents who had been waiting outside a local Cinema following a tip off.

1991 Jeffrey Dahmer is caught

2009 The longest total solar eclipse of the 21st century, ( when the Moon passes between Earth and the Sun, thereby totally or partially obscuring Earth's view of the Sun ) lasting up to 6 minutes and 38.8 seconds, occurs off the coast of Southeast Asia.

23rd July

1952 Military Coup d'etat Egypt

1967 Detroit Riots

1976 First Cases Of Legionnaires Disease

1986 Prince Andrew married English commoner Sarah Ferguson at Westminster Abbey

24th July

1969 Apollo 11, the U.S. spacecraft that had taken the first astronauts to the surface of the moon, safely returns to Earth

1990 Iraq Troops Mass On Border of Kuwait

2005 Lance Armstrong Wins 7th Tour De France

25th July

1943 Benito Mussolini, the prime minister and dictator of Italy for 21 years, was forced from office

1952 Puerto Rico became a self-governing commonwealth of the United States.

1978 Lesley Brown gave birth to the world's first test tube baby ( in-vitro fertilization ) delivered by caesarean section in Oldham, England

2000 An Air France Concorde jet bound for New York crashes upon takeoff in Paris killing everyone onboard

26th July

1956 Suez Crisis Begins

27th July

1909 The world's airplane record for two men, was broken in a flight of one hour, twelve minutes and forty seconds over fifty miles and at a speed averaging about forty miles an hour by Orville Wright and Lieutenant Frank P. Lahm, of the army signal corps, as passenger.

1974 The House of Representatives charges President Richard M. Nixon with the first of three articles of impeachment for obstruction of justice

28th July

1932 Federal troops under the order of President Hoover forcibly dispersed the "Bonus Army" of ( 17,000 World War I veterans ) who had gathered in Washington, D.C.

1956 Elvis Presley scores his second No. 1 hit with "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You."

29th July

1945 I-58 Japanese submarine sinks the American cruiser Indianapolis, killing 883 seamen in the worst loss in the history of the U.S. navy.

1976 The so called "Son of Sam" pulls a gun from a paper bag and fires five shots at Donna Lauria and Jody Valenti of the Bronx while they are sitting in a car. Lauria died and Valenti was seriously wounded in the first in a series of shootings by the serial killer, who terrorized New York City over the course of the next year.

1981 Prince Charles marries Lady Diana at a royal ceremony at St. Paul's Cathedral

30th July

1965 The Social Security Act of 1965 was signed by U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson which established the nation's Medicare and Medicaid programs, financed by higher Social Security payroll taxes.

1966 England win the World Cup in extra time at Wembley Stadium 4 to 2

31st July :