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| Florence Harding |
July 8, 1497 – Vasco da Gama set sail on the first direct
European voyage to India.
July 8, 1538 – Spanish general and explorer Diego de Almagro,
age 62 or 63, was executed by garrote in a dungeon and then decapitated in
Cuzco, New Castile, Spanish Empire. His corpse was taken to the public Plaza
Mayor of Cuzco, where a herald proclaimed his crimes. Almagro, a companion and
later rival of Francisco Pizarro, was a Spanish conquistador, who participated
in the Spanish conquest of Peru and is credited as the first European
discoverer of Chile.
July 8, 1608 - The first French settlement at Quebec was
established by Samuel de Champlain.
July 8, 1663 – Charles II of England granted John Clarke a
Royal charter to Rhode Island.
July 8, 1755 - Britain broke off diplomatic relations with
France as their disputes in the New World intensified.
July 8, 1775 – The Olive Branch Petition was signed by the Continental
Congress of the Thirteen Colonies of North America.
July 8, 1776 – From the tower of the Pennsylvania State
House (now Independence Hall) in Philadelphia, the 2,000-pound copper-and-tin
“Liberty Bell” range out, summoning citizens to the first public reading of the
Declaration of Independence. Col. John Nixon gave the first public reading at
Independence Square. Four days earlier, the historic document had been adopted
by delegates to the Continental Congress, but the bell did not ring to announce
the issuing of the document until the Declaration of Independence returned from
the printer on July 8.
July 8, 1777 - A convention of delegates in Windsor, Vermont
formally adopted the state's new constitution.
July 8, 1819 – Irish admiral and explorer Francis Leopold
McClintock was born in Dundalk, County Louth. A former officer in the British
Royal Navy, McClintock is best known for his discoveries in the Canadian Arctic
Archipelago.
July 8, 1857 – French psychologist Alfred Binet was born in
Nice, France.
July 8, 1863 - Port Hudson, the Confederate stronghold on
the Mississippi River in Louisiana, fell to Nathaniel Banks' Union force. Less
than a week after the surrender of Vicksburg, Mississippi, the Confederate
garrison’s surrender at Port Hudson cleared another obstacle for the Federals
on the Mississippi River. Port Hudson was defended by General Franklin Gardner
and a force of 3,500 men, but word of Vicksburg’s surrender convinced Gardner
that further resistance was futile
July 8, 1864 – During the Civil War, a skirmish was fought at Vienna, Ala.
July 8, 1865 - C.E. Barnes patented the machine gun.
July 8, 1877 – John Sampey Sr., one of Conecuh County’s
original settlers, cattle farmers and Methodists, died at the age of 76 in
Belleville, Ala. Sampey was born in Belfast, County Antrim, Northern Ireland on April 20, 1801 and sailed for America on Sept. 12, 1824. He is buried in the
Belleville United Methodist Church Cemetery.
July 8, 1879 – The sailing ship USS Jeannette departed
San Francisco carrying an ill-fated expedition to the North Pole.
July 8, 1889 – The first issue of The Wall Street Journal
was published.
July 8, 1891 - Future President Warren G. Harding married a
spunky divorcee named Florence Mabel Kling DeWolfe in Marion, Ohio. Harding,
the 29th President of the United States, was the great-grandson of Conecuh
County’s Henchie Warren, who is said to have hid a chest of gold in Shipps
Pond.
July 8, 1892 – Novelist and poet Richard Aldington was born
in Edward Godfree Aldington in Portsmouth, England.
July 8, 1912 – Castleberry, Ala. town marshal M.C. Johnson
arrested Roland Baggett and a “young man named Crockett” on charges of
attempted murder and placed them in the Conecuh County Jail in Evergreen.
Allegedly, Baggett and Crockett attempted to kill Bob Knight of Castleberry on
July 6. Knight had been shot in the back with a .32-caliber bullet that passed
through his body and his chances of recovery didn’t look good.
July 8, 1914 – The Evergreen Courant reported that William
Ellis “exhibited a piece of broken earthenware here recently which he says he
found 30 feet under the surface of the earth while boring a well on his
premises. How it came there is unexplainable.”
July 8, 1918 - Ernest Hemingway was severely wounded while
carrying a companion to safety on the Austro-Italian front during World War I.
Hemingway, working as a Red Cross ambulance driver, was decorated for his
heroism and sent home. He would received the Pulitizer Prize in 1953 for his
novel, “The Old Man and the Sea.”
July 8, 1926 – Psychiatrist and writer Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
was born in Zurich, Switzerland.
July 8, 1929 – Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Shirley Ann
Grau was born in New Orleans. She won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1965
for “The Keepers of the House.”
July 8, 1937 – Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan signed the
Treaty of Saadabad.
July 8, 1941 - With his team trailing 5-4 with two outs in
the ninth inning, Ted Williams hits a three-run home run to lead the American
League to a 7-5 victory in the All-Star Game at Briggs Stadium in Detroit.
July 8, 1947 – In what became known as the “Roswell UFO
Incident,” the U.S. Army announced it had recovered a crashed flying disc near
Roswell, New Mexico. Quickly afterward they retracted the story, and said it
was actually a "weather balloon."
July 8, 1950 – Melvin Salter, the son of Hilliard Salter of
Evergreen, Ala. was reported missing in action in Korea. He served with the
paratroopers in World War II and reenlisted about two years before he went
missing.
July 8, 1951 - The city of Paris celebrated her 2,000th
birthday.
July 8, 1953 - Notre Dame announced that the next five years
of its football games would be shown in theatres over closed circuit TV.
July 8, 1959 - Maj. Dale R. Ruis and Master Sgt. Chester M.
Ovnand became the first Americans killed in the American phase of the Vietnam
War when guerrillas struck a Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) compound
in Bien Hoa, 20 miles northeast of Saigon.
July 8, 1963 - Eddie Rankin, age six, of Route F, Evergreen,
Ala., was killed this afternoon when he dashed into the path of a 1962 Ford,
driven by Mrs. Velma Worlds of Route 1, Castleberry. “Trooper Cargile said that
it was impossible for Mrs. World’s to avoid hitting the child.”
July 8, 1965 – John Sale of Brewton, Ala., the reigning
state high school champion, defeated Forrest Watkins of Monroeville in a
18-hole playoff for the championship of the Evergreen Golf Club’s July 4th Invitational
Tournament.
July 8, 1965 - Author T. S. Stribling died in Florence, Ala.
July
8, 1970 - The San Francisco Giant’s Jim Ray Hart became the first National
League player in 59 seasons to collect six runs batted (RBI) during a single
inning.
July
8, 1982 – An assassination attempt against Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in
Dujail occurred.
July
8, 1994 – Swedish-American businessman and explorer Lars-Eric Lindblad died of
a sudden heart attack while on vacation in Stockholm. Lindblad pioneered
tourism to many remote and exotic parts of the world, led the first tourist
expedition to Antarctica in 1966 in a chartered Argentine navy ship and for
many years operated his own vessel, the MS Lindblad Explorer, in the
region.
July
4, 2000 - J.K. Rowling's fourth Harry Potter book, "Harry Potter and the
Goblet of Fire," was released in the U.S.
July
4, 2002 - U.S. President George W. Bush promised to "use all the tools at
our disposal" to bring down Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
July 8, 2008 - Luther Upton, then age 61, of Evergreen
announced that he had qualified to run for the District 3 seat on the Evergreen
City Council during municipal elections on Aug. 26, 2008.
July 8, 2013 – “Get Out Alive with Bear Grylls,” a reality
competition series filmed in New Zealand, premiered on NBC.
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