1971 – Apollo program: Apollo 15 astronauts become the first to ride in a lunar rover.

1964 – Ranger program: Ranger 7 sends back the first close-up photographs of the moon, with images 1,000 times clearer than anything ever seen from earth-bound telescopes.

1930 – The radio mystery program The Shadow airs for the first time.

2003 – In Mexico, the last 'old style' Volkswagen Beetle rolls off the assembly line.

1990 – George Steinbrenner is forced by Commissioner Fay Vincent to resign as principal partner of New York Yankees for hiring Howie Spira to "get dirt" on Dave Winfield.

1975 – Jimmy Hoffa disappears from the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, at about 2:30 p.m. He is never seen or heard from again, and will be declared legally dead on this date in 1982.

1971 – Apollo program: Apollo 15 Mission – David Scott and James Irwin on the Apollo Lunar Module module Falcon land on the Moon with the first Lunar Rover.

1965 – U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Social Security Act of 1965 into law, establishing Medicare and Medicaid.

1956 – A joint resolution of the U.S. Congress is signed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, authorizing In God we trust as the U.S. national motto.

1419 – First Defenestration of Prague: a crowd of radical Hussites kill seven members of the Prague city council.

July 28, 1965. A flier protesting the draft for the Vietnam War was published in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party newsletter in McComb, Mississippi. Read full text here: http://bit.ly/18anyGw Also, see the educational graphic novel on the Vietnam War by Julian Bond: http://bit.ly/1zlvhy0 (The full booklet, written in 1967 by Bond after he was expelled from his elected seat in the Georgia House of Representatives for opposing the war in Vietnam, is online and a great resource for students today on the history of the Vietnam War.) On this topic, recently we spoke with SNCC veteran Frank Smith (D.C. Council) who explained that while he was in jail in Mississippi for helping people register to vote, his draft notice for the Vietnam War was sent to his home. He could not report for duty because he was in jail for fighting for democracy in the U.S.

1940 – The animated short A Wild Hare is released, introducing the character of Bugs Bunny.

1890 – Vincent van Gogh shoots himself and dies two days later.

When Copy and Paste Reigned in the Age of Scrapbooking
Today’s obsession with posting material to Pinterest, Facebook and Twitter has a very American history

No Gun Ri Massacre

1947 – Cold War: U.S. President Harry S. Truman signs the National Security Act of 1947 into United States law creating the Central Intelligence Agency, United States Department of Defense, United States Air Force, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the United States National Security Council.

1882 – Premiere of Richard Wagner's opera Parsifal at Bayreuth.

Paunchy, balding and bloated, Farouk was thirty-two when he lost his throne. The Egyptian monarchy had been set up by the British in the 1920s and Farouk had been king for sixteen years since succeeding his father, Fuad I, in 1936. Sir Miles Lampson, the British high commissioner, described him in a report to the Foreign Office in 1937 as ‘uneducated, lazy, untruthful, capricious, irresponsible and vain, though with a quick superficial intelligence and charm of manner’. Farouk’s attempts to introduce reforms made little progress against the Egyptian establishment of politicians and major landowners. He also butted his head vainly against the British and by 1949 he was despised at home and abroad as an ineffectual playboy.

By that time a group of Egyptian army and airforce officers was secretly planning a revolution to get rid of both the British and the entrenched Egyptian regime. They had all been stung by ignominious defeat in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and they blamed the King, the politicians and the corruption endemic in the system. The Free Officers, as they called themselves, gathered substantial support among the officer corps. Their leader was Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser and Anwar Sadat was one of them. Many of them had been at the Military Academy in Cairo in the later 1930s and, according to Sadat, a secret officers’ revolutionary society had been founded as early as 1939. Nasser was a teacher at the Military Academy in the 1940s and influenced many up-and-coming young officers.

The Egyptian army had long been controlled by the king, but Farouk’s scandalous and grotesquely self-indulgent lifestyle and the belief that some of his closest associates had profited by supplying defective weapons and munitions to the forces had eroded the army’s loyalty. At the end of 1951 the Free Officers ran their own slate of candidates for election to the board of directors of the Officers’ Club in Cairo. Their candidate for club president was General Mohammed Neguib, one of the few high-ranking officers who had distinguished himself in the war. The King personally endorsed rival candidates of his own, but the Free Officers’ candidates won.

Farouk regarded his election defeat as evidence of a seditious conspiracy in the officer corps, as indeed it was. His efforts to recover control drove the plotters to drastic action. They feared that their counsels had been penetrated by informers and that they were in imminent danger of arrest.

The decision to attempt a coup seems to have been taken early in the morning of July 22nd. At midnight, while the court was enjoying a late champagne and caviar picnic in Alexandria, some 200 officers and 3,000 troops took control of army headquarters and put senior officers under arrest. Troops occupied the airport, the Cairo broadcasting station and the telecommunications centre, and tanks and infantry patrolled the Cairo streets. There was no opposition and at 7am on July 23rd Sadat announced the take-over on Cairo radio.

Farouk, at his summer palace in Alexandria, has been criticised for not immediately taking command of the troops there. Apparently, he turned that course down for fear of causing civil war and bloodshed. Instead he appealed to the American ambassador for help, but the Americans had no confidence in him and the CIA had been encouraging the plotters, whose armoured columns now took control of Alexandria. The British force in the Canal Zone made no move to interfere. Farouk betook himself to the Ras el-Tin palace by the western harbour in Alexandria, but the coup leaders ordered the captain of his seagoing yacht, the Mahroussa, not to sail without their orders. (...)

2010 – WikiLeaks publishes classified documents about the War in Afghanistan, one of the largest leaks in U.S. military history.

1984 – Salyut 7 cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya becomes the first woman to perform a space walk.