July 7

1124 – The city of Tyre falls to the Venetian Crusade after a long siege.

1456 – A retrial verdict acquits Joan of Arc of heresy 25 years after her death.

1534 – Jacques Cartier makes his first contact with native peoples in what is now Canada.

1777 – American forces retreating from Fort Ticonderoga are defeated in the Battle of Hubbardton.

1846 – During the Mexican-American War, US troops of the Pacific Naval Squadron occupy the port towns of Monterey and Yerba Buena (modern day San Francisco) , in the Mexican province of California.

1863 – The United States begins its first military draft; exemptions cost $300.

1865 – 4 conspirators in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln are hanged in the yard of Fort McNair in Washington D.C.

1898 – President McKinley signs the Newlands Resolution annexing Hawaii as a territory of the United States.

1907 – Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. stages his first Follies on the roof of the New York Theater in New York City.

1911 – The U.S., UK, Japan, and Russia sign the North Pacific Fur Seal Convention of 1911, banning open water seal hunting, the first international treaty to address wildlife preservation issues.

1928 – Sliced bread is sold for the first time by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri.

1930 – Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser begins construction of Boulder Dam (now known as Hoover Dam).

1944 – During the World War II U.S. invasion of Saipan, General Yoshitsugu Saitō orders the largest banzai charge of the war, gathering close to 4,300 Japanese soldiers and charging directly into the U.S. Army’s 1st and 2nd Battalions of the 105th Infantry Regiment, killing or wounding over 2,000 men in a 15 hour battle until almost all the Japanese soldiers taking part in the charge are killed.

1946 – While piloting the plane on its maiden flight, Howard Hughes nearly dies when his XF-11 reconnaissance aircraft prototype crashes in a Beverly Hills neighborhood.

1952 – The ocean liner SS United States passes Bishop Rock on her maiden voyage, breaking the transatlantic speed record to become the fastest passenger ship in the world.

1958 – President Eisenhower signs the Alaska Statehood Act into law.

1981 –President Reagan appoints Sandra Day O’Connor to become the first female member of the Supreme Court.

1983 – Samantha Smith, a US schoolgirl, flies to the Soviet Union at the invitation of Secretary General Yuri Andropov in response to a letter she wrote to him.

1992 – The New York State Court of Appeals rules that women have the same right as men to go topless in public.

2003 – NASA Opportunity rover, MER-B or Mars Exploration Rover–B, is launched aboard a Delta II rocket at Cape Canaveral Launch Site 17B

2013 – A Rediske Air, De Havilland Otter air taxi, crashes in Soldotna, Alaska, killing all 10 passengers and crew aboard.

2016 – A disgruntled black man shoots 14 policemen during an anti police protest in downtown Dallas, Texas, killing 5 of them. He is subsequently killed by a robot delivered bomb while holed up in a college library building.