July 16, 1948: The Miss Macao becomes the first commercial airliner to be hijacked. 25 die.
July 16, 1969: Apollo 11 blasts off from Cape Kennedy, Florida, heading for a landing on the moon. (One of the best days of my life.)
July 16, 1941: Joe DiMaggio hits safely for the 56th consecutive game, a streak that still stands as an MLB record.
July 17, 1998: A 7.0 earthquake off the coast of New Guinea triggers a tsunami that kills between 2100 and 2700 people. Thousands more are injured.
July 17, 1864: Confederate President Jefferson Davis replaces General Joseph E. Johnston with General John Bell Hood in hopes of defeating Union General William T. Sherman outside Atlanta.
July 18, 1969: Senator Ted Kennedy crashes his car into a tidal basin at Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, killing his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne.
July 18, 1942: The German Me-262, the first jet-propelled aircraft to fly in combat, makes its first flight.
July 19, 1975: Apollo and Soyuz spacecrafts dock in orbit.
July 20, 1969: At 20:17 UTC, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed their spacecraft, Eagle, at Mare Tranquilitatis on the surface of Earth’s Moon; Command Module Pilot Michael Colllins remained on orbit in Columbia, the most alone human in existence, for about 22 hours until Armstrong and Aldrin rejoined him . Later, Armstrong became the first of twelve humans to walk of the surface of Luna throughout the Apollo program.
July 21, 1952: The 7.7 White Wolf Fault Earthquake in California kills 14. This is the third strongest earthquake in that state’s recorded history.
July 21, 1925: In Dayton, Tennessee, high school biology teacher John T. Scopes is found guilty of teaching evolution in class and fined $100.
July 21, 1954: France signs an armistice with the Viet Minh to end the war and divide Vietnam into two countries.
July 22, 2011: A lone bomber/gunman kills 77 in Norway.
July 22, 1966: B-52 bombers hit the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Vietnam for the first time.
July 23, 1982: Outside Santa Clarita, California, actor Vic Morrow and two children are killed when a helicopter crashes onto them while shooting a scene from Twilight Zone: The Movie.
July 23, 1995 Comet Hale–Bopp is discovered; it becomes visible to the naked eye on Earth nearly a year later.
July 23, 1903: The Ford Motor Company sells its first automobile, the Model A.
July 24, 1943: “Operation Gomorrah” begins: British and Canadian airplanes bomb Hamburg by night, and American planes bomb the city by day. By the end of the operation in November, 9,000 tons of explosives will have killed more than 30,000 people and destroyed 280,000 buildings.
July 24, 1974: The Supreme Court rules that President Richard Nixon must surrender the Watergate tapes.
July 25, 1984: Svetlana Savitskaya becomes first woman to perform a space walk.