1593 – Henry IV of France publicly converts from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism.
1603 – James VI of Scotland is crowned king of England (James I of England), bringing the Kingdom of England and Kingdom of Scotland into personal union. Political union would occur in 1707.
1609 – The English ship Sea Venture, en route to Virginia, is deliberately driven ashore during a storm at Bermuda to prevent its sinking; the survivors go on to found a new colony there.
1722 – Dummer’s War begins along the Maine-Massachusetts border.
1783 – American Revolutionary War: The war’s last action, the Siege of Cuddalore, is ended by a preliminary peace agreement.
1788 – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart completes his Symphony No. 40 in G minor (K550).
1792 – The Brunswick Manifesto is issued to the population of Paris promising vengeance if the French royal family is harmed.
1861 – American Civil War: The United States Congress passes the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution, stating that the war is being fought to preserve the Union and not to end slavery.
1866 – The United States Congress passes legislation authorizing the rank of General of the Army. Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant becomes the first to be promoted to this rank.
1898 – In the Puerto Rican Campaign, the United States seizes Puerto Rico from Spain.
On July 25 1898, a detachment of American marines and sailors waded ashore Puerto Rico and secured the town of Guánica and raised the American flag over its customs house. With this, the U.S. effectively took control of Puerto Rico.
1908 – Kikunae Ikeda of the Tokyo Imperial University discovers that a key ingredient in kombu soup stock is monosodium glutamate (MSG), and patents a process for manufacturing it.
1917 – Sir Robert Borden introduces the first income tax in Canada as a “temporary” measure (lowest bracket is 4% and highest is 25%).
1943 – World War II: Benito Mussolini is forced out of office by the Grand Council of Fascism and is replaced by Pietro Badoglio.
1946 – Operation Crossroads: An atomic bomb is detonated underwater in the lagoon of Bikini Atoll.
1961 – In a speech John F. Kennedy emphasizes that any attack on Berlin is an attack on NATO.
1965 – Bob Dylan goes electric at the Newport Folk Festival, signaling a major change in folk and rock music.
1969 – Vietnam War: U.S. President Richard Nixon declares the Nixon Doctrine, stating that the United States now expects its Asian allies to take care of their own military defense. This is the start of the “Vietnamization” of the war.
1978 – Puerto Rican police shoot two nationalists in the Cerro Maravilla murders.
1979 – Another section of the Sinai Peninsula is peacefully returned by Israel to Egypt.
1984 – Salyut 7 cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya becomes the first woman to perform a space walk.
1994 – Israel and Jordan sign the Washington Declaration, that formally ends the state of war that had existed between the nations since 1948.
2010 – WikiLeaks publishes classified documents about the War in Afghanistan, one of the largest leaks in U.S. military history.
Births
1861 – Andrew Cowper Lawson, Scottish-Canadian Geologist, the first to identify and name the San Andreas Fault.
1874 – Sergey Vasilyevich Lebedev, Russian Chemist, invented the first commercially viable and mass-produced synthetic rubber.
1920 – Rosalind Franklin, English chemist and co-discoverer of the structure of DNA.
Deaths
1865 – James Barry [Margaret Ann Bulkley], British military surgeon and the first woman in Great Britain to become a qualified medical doctor.