ON JULY 4 ...
In 1776,
the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence.
In 1802
the U.S. Military Academy opened at West Point, N.Y.
In 1826
the nation’s second and third presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, died.
In 1831
the fifth U.S. president, James Monroe, died in New York.
In 1845
author Henry David Thoreau began his 2-year experiment in simple living at Walden Pond near Concord, Mass.
In 1863
Union troops under Gen. Ulysses Grant defeated Confederate forces at Vicksburg, Miss., ending a 14-month siege in the Civil War.
In 1917,
during a ceremony in Paris honoring the French hero of the American Revolution, U.S. Lt. Col. Charles Stanton declared, “Lafayette, we are here!”
In 1927
playwright Neil Simon was born in New York.
In 1946
the Philippines became an independent republic after 48 years of U.S. sovereignty.
In 1959
America’s 49-star flag honoring Alaska statehood was officially unfurled. Exactly a year later, the 50-star flag honoring Hawaii’s statehood was officially unfurled.
In 1976
Israeli commandos raiding Entebbe airport in Uganda completed their rescue of almost all of the passengers and crew of an Air France jetliner seized by pro-Palestinian hijackers.
In 1980
North Michigan Avenue was jammed with people attending the first Taste of Chicago.
In 1994
Rwandan Tutsi rebels seized control of most of their country’s capital, Kigali, from the Hutuled government.
In 1997
NASA’s Pathfinder spacecraft landed on Mars, inaugurating a new era in the search for life on the Red Planet.
In 1999
white supremacist Benjamin Nathaniel Smith shot himself to death as police closed in on him in southern Illinois, hours after he had shot and killed a Korean man in Bloomington, Ind.
In 2003
Los Angeles Lakers guard Kobe Bryant was arrested on suspicion of sexual assault after a woman accused him of sexual misconduct at a hotel near Vail, Colo. (Prosecutors later dropped a criminal charge against Bryant because the woman did not want to go ahead with a trial.) Also in 2003 singer Barry White died in Los Angeles; he was 58.
In 2004
a 20-ton slab of granite, inscribed to honor “the enduring spirit of freedom,” was laid at the World Trade Center site as the cornerstone of the future Freedom Tower skyscraper.
In 2007
the Black Sea resort of Sochi was elected the host city of the 2014 Winter Olympics, taking the Winter Games to Russia for the first time.
In 2013
Adly Mansour was sworn in as acting president of Egypt, one day after the military ousted Islamist leader Mohammed Morsi. Also in 2013 the Statue of Liberty reopened to the public, eight months after superstorm Sandy shut it down Oct. 29.
In 2016
NASA received a radio signal from the solar-powered Juno spacecraft confirming that it was in orbit around the planet Jupiter after a trip of nearly five years and 1.8 billion miles.