July 15

70 – After 3 days of siege the army of Roman general – and later emperor – Titus breaches the walls of Jerusalem.

1099 – Christian soldiers of the First Crusade take the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem after a final assault.

1149 – The reconstructed Church of the Holy Sepulchre is consecrated in Jerusalem.

1482 – Muhammad XII is crowned the 22nd and last moslem king of Granada.

1741 – Aleksei Chirikov sights land in Southeast Alaska. He sends men ashore, making them the first Europeans to visit Alaska.

1789 – Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, is named by acclamation Colonel General of the new National Guard of Paris during the French revolution.

1799 – The Rosetta Stone is found in, of all places, the Egyptian village of Rosetta by French Captain Pierre François Bouchard

1806 – Lieutenant Zebulon Pike begins an expedition of the west from Fort Bellefontaine, Missouri

1834 – The Spanish Inquisition, which no one ever expected, is officially disbanded after nearly 356 years of operation.

1862 – On the Mississippi river, the Confederate ironclad Arkansas, under the command of Captain Isaac N. Brown engages the Union flotilla of the Carondelet, Tyler, and Queen of the West, commanded by Admiral David Farragut. All ships sustain heavy damage but the Arkansas breaks through to Vicksburg

1870 – Georgia becomes the last of the former Confederate states to be readmitted to the Union under Reconstruction.

1910 – In his book Clinical Psychiatry, Emil Kraepelin gives a name to Alzheimer’s disease, naming it after his colleague Alois Alzheimer.

1916 – In Seattle, Washington, William Boeing and George Conrad Westervelt incorporate Pacific Aero Products, later renamed Boeing.

1918 – The Second Battle of the Marne during World War I begins with a German attack.

1948 – General of The Armies, John J. ‘Black Jack’ Pershing, age 87, dies at Walter Reed General Hospital in Washington, D.C.

1954 – The prototype for both the Boeing 707 and C-135 series, the Boeing 367-80 makes its maiden flight

1975 – The Apollo–Soyuz Test Project features the dual launch of an Apollo spacecraft and a Soyuz spacecraft on the first joint Soviet/United States human crewed flight.

2002 – “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh pleads guilty to supplying aid to the enemy and to possession of explosives during the commission of a felony.

2006 – Twitter is launched.

2016 – Steven Fjestad, age 68 author of multiple editions of the Blue Book of Gun Values dies of a short illness at his home in Minnesota.