Preliminary work begins on the Hoover Dam

For the first time in U.S. history, the House of Representatives exercises its constitutional power of impeachment and votes to charge Senator William Blount of Tennessee with “a high misdemeanor, entirely inconsistent with his public duty and trust as a Senator.” In 1790, President George Washington appointed Blount, who had fought in the American Revolution, […]

On July 7, 1863, the Union’s Lt. Colonel Christopher “Kit” Carson leaves Santa Fe with his troops, beginning his campaign against the Native Americans of New Mexico and Arizona. A mountain man before the Civil War, Kit Carson was responsible for waging a destructive war against the Navajo that resulted in their removal from the […]

On July 7, 1912, Jim Thorpe wins the pentathlon at the fifth modern Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden. At the time, Thorpe, a Native American who attended Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian School, was only beginning to establish his reputation as the greatest all-around athlete in the world. Born May 28, 1887, in Prague, Oklahoma, on a Sac-and-Fox […]

On July 7, 1942, Heinrich Himmler, in league with three others, including a physician, decides to begin experimenting on women in the Auschwitz concentration camps and to investigate extending this experimentation on males. Himmler, architect of Hitler’s program to exterminate Europe’s Jewish population, convened a conference in Berlin to discuss the prospects for using concentration […]

For the first time in history, women are enrolled into the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. On May 28, 1980, 62 of these female cadets graduated and were commissioned as second lieutenants. The United States Military Academy—the first military school in America—was founded by Congress in 1802 for the purpose of […]

Samantha Smith, an 11-year-old American girl, begins a two-week visit to the Soviet Union at the invitation of Soviet leader Yuri Andropov. Some American observers believed that Smith was merely being used by the Soviets for their own propaganda purposes, while others saw her visit as a positive step toward improving U.S.-Russian relations. In April […]

On the morning of July 7, 2005, bombs are detonated in three crowded London subways and one bus during the peak of the city’s rush hour. The synchronized suicide bombings, which were thought to be the work of al-Qaeda, killed 56 people including the bombers and injured another 700. It was the largest attack on […]