July 2
1964
U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson carried out John F. Kennedy’s campaign for civil rights reform and signed into law the historic Civil Rights Act in a nationally televised ceremony at the White House.
July 4
1776
U.S. declared independence. In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the Continental Congress adopts the Declaration of Independence, which proclaims the independence of the United States of America from Great Britain and its king.
1826
Former Presidents Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on the same day. They both were the last surviving members of the original American revolutionaries who had stood up to the British Empire and forged a new political system in the former colonies.
July 10
1850
Vice President Millard Fillmore was sworn in as the 13th president of the United States. President Zachary Taylor had died the day before.
July 12
1957
Dwight D. Eisenhower became the first president to ride in the newest advance in aviation technology: the helicopter.
July 13
1960
In Los Angeles, California, Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts was nominated for the presidency by the Democratic Party Convention, defeating Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas.
July 16
1790
The American Congress declared that Washington D.C. would be the nation’s permanent capital. “Washington,” in the newly designated federal “District of Columbia,” was named after the leader of the American Revolution and the country’s first president: George Washington.
2002
President George W. Bush announces his plan for strengthening homeland security in the wake of the shocking September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.
July 18
1940
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who first took office in 1933 as America’s 32nd president, is nominated for an unprecedented-third term. Roosevelt, a Democrat, would eventually be elected to a record four terms in office, the only U.S. president to serve more than two terms.
July 20
1969
President Richard Nixon watched two American astronauts walk on the moon. He recorded succinctly in his diary “the President held an interplanetary conversation with Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin on the Moon.”
July 22
1862
President Abraham Lincoln informed his cabinet that he would issue a proclamation to free slaves.
July 23
1885
Civil War hero and former President Ulysses S. Grant died of throat cancer.
July 27
1974
The House Judiciary Committee charged that America’s 37th president, Richard M. Nixon, be impeached and removed from office. The impeachment proceedings resulted from a series of political scandals involving the Nixon administration that came to be collectively known as Watergate.
July 29
1958
President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs an act that creates the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
July 31
1875
Former President Andrew Johnson, the man who had become president upon the tragic assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865, died of a stroke while visiting his daughter in Tennessee.
