In a This Day in History video, learn that on July 24, 1911 an American explorer, Hiram Bingham, time-traveled to the lost culture of the fabled Inca empire, which disappeared with the Spanish conquests. Bingham was exploring Peru when a local farmer told him about ruins which he called Machu Picchu, or Old Mountain. The next day, the farmer led Bingham to families growing corn; their corn fields happen to be in the middle of a sprawling lost city. Bingham took the first of millions of photos of the ancient city; abandoned for 400 years, the lost city was revealed.
On July 26, 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981, mandating the desegregation of the U.S. Armed Forces and ending 170 years of officially sanctioned racial discrimination in the military. Although African Americans had served since the Revolutionary War, they were typically segregated from white troops and often assigned to menial roles. A landmark achievement of both the postwar civil rights movement and Truman’s presidency, the order marked one of the first times a U.S. president used executive authority to advance civil rights. It also helped pave the way for broader desegregation efforts across American society.
On October 29, 1969, Stanford programmer Bill Duvall sent a single-word message—"login"—to UCLA student programmer Charley Kline, 350 miles away. Transmitted between two computers that each filled an entire room, this message marked the first communication between networked computers and is widely regarded as the birth of the internet.