356 BC - The Temple of Artemus in Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, is totally and utterly destroyed by arson.
365 AD - A tsunami devastates the city of Alexandria, Egypt. The tsunami was caused by an earthquake off the coast of Crete. 5,000 people in the city perished, as well as, 45,000 more died from flooding outside the city limits.
1403 - Battle of Shrewsbury occurs, King Henry IV of England defeats rebels to the north, in the county town of Shropshire.
1774 - Russia and the Ottoman Empire sign the Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji ending the Russo-Turkish War.
1861 - The first major battle of the American Civil War erupts at Manassas Junction, Virginia. It will be known as the First Battle of Bull Run or First Battle of Manassas. The war, instead of lasting three months, as most Americans assumed, would last four more bloody years. The battle was considered a victory for the Confederacy.
1865 - The famous gunslinger Wild Bill Hickock shoots and kills Davis Tutt in the market square of Springfield, Missouri. This should be regarded as the first western showdown.
1873 - Jesse James and his James-Younger Gang pull of the first successful train robbery in Adair, Iowa. This is the first in the American Old West, and will be only the beginning for the outlaw and his bandits.
1889 - American writer and Nobel laureate Ernest Hemingway is born.
1904 - Louis Rigolly, a Frenchman, becomes the first man to break the 100 mph or 161 km/h speed barrier on land. He was driving a 15-liter Gobron-Brille in Ostend, Belgium.
1925 - In Dayton, Tennessee, a high school biology teacher by the name of John T. Scopes, is found guilty of teaching Darwin's theory of evolution to his students, and his eventually fined $100.
1925 - Sir Malcolm Campbell becomes the first man to exceed the 1904 record, and reach the 150 mph or 241 km/h land speed barrier at Pendine Sands in Wales. He drove a Sunbeam automobile.
1944 - American troops land on the island of Guam in the Pacific. This would begin the battle and the island would not be taken and cleared of Japanese until August 10.
1944 - The conspirators that were associated in the July 20 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, including Claus Von Stauffenberg and 200 others were executed. An estimated 5,000 people were arrested.
1951 - American comedian and actor Robin Williams is born.
1954 - The Geneva Conference partitions Vietnam into the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the North and the State of Vietnam in the South during the First Indochina War.
1959 - Elijah Jerry "Pumpsie" Green becomes the first African-American to play for the Boston Red Sox, the last professional baseball team to integrate. He came in as a pinch runner for Vic Wertz and also took over duties at shortstop.
1961 - Gus Grissom as part of Mercury-Redstone 4 Mission, piloting the Liberty Bell 7 becomes the second American to go into space.
1967 - American baseball player, first baseman and power hitter James Emory Foxx passed away.
1983 - The world's lowest recorded temperature is taken at Vostok Station in Antarctica at -89.2 C or -128.6 F.
1997 - The fully restored USS Constitution, known as "Old Ironsides," celebrates her 200th birthday by setting sail for the first time in 116 years.
1998 - Alan Shephard, astronaut who became the second person and first American in space, dies at the age of 74.
SAM BASS - was a nineteenth-century American train robber, after failing at a series of legitimate enterprises turned to crime. He was born this date in 1851 in Mitchell, Indiana and died this same day in 1878 in Round Rock, Texas. Bass was only 27, and is one of the great stories of the Wild West.
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