Today in history, July 7

July 7

Today in history

Today is July 7. On this date in:

1456: Joan of Arc was acquitted and declared innocent of alleged heresy by a retrial verdict 25 years after her execution by burning. The original trial was found to be invalid due to fraud and deceit. Joan was put on trial for blasphemy for wearing men’s clothing and having alleged demonic visions.

1834: The New York Anti-Abolition Riots began as mobs attacked large swaths of New York City, targeting homes, churches and businesses of Black residents and known abolitionists. The riots lasted for almost a week before military intervention put a stop to them.

1865: Four co-conspirators in President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination – Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt, David Herold, and Mary Surratt – were executed by hanging at the Old Arsenal Penitentiary in Washington, DC, present-day Fort McNair.

1898: The Hawaiian Islands are annexed by the United States via the Newlands Resolution, which was signed by President William McKinley.

1911: The North Pacific Fur Seal Convention of 1911 was signed by the United States, Great Britain, Japan, and Russia. The agreement banned open-water seal hunting north of the 30th parallel in the Pacific Ocean. It was the first international treaty designed to tackle the issue of wildlife preservation.

1928: Sliced bread first went on sale at the Chillicothe Baking Co. in Chillicothe, Missouri. The loaves were cut using a machine devised by Otto Rohwedder.

1930: Construction of the Hoover Dam began. One of the United States' largest human-made projects, the building of Hoover Dam took five years and a labor force of 20,000.

1930: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died of a heart attack at age 71 in Crowborough, East Sussex, England. Doyle is best known for creating the self-described "consulting detective" Sherlock Holmes.

1937: The Second Sino-Japanese War began as China’s National Revolutionary Army and the Imperial Japanese Army exchanged fire near the Marco Polo Bridge in Beijing.

1942: Heinrich Himmler decides to begin medical experiments on Auschwitz prisoners as a way to procure a faster method of sterilization to “not only to defeat the (Jewish) enemy but also to exterminate him.”

1946: Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini became the first U.S. citizen to become a saint after she was canonized by Pope Pius XII and the Roman Catholic Church. Pius XII proclaimed her as the “Patroness of Immigrants.”

1958: Alaska became the 49th state after President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Alaska Statehood Act into law. It became official on Jan. 3, 1959.

1976: A total of 119 women made history and enrolled at West Point, becoming the first women to join the U.S. Corps of Cadets.

1981: President Ronald Reagan announced that he would nominate Sandra Day O’Connor to the Supreme Court, making her the first woman to serve as a justice on the nation’s highest court.

2005: A series of coordinated suicide bomb attacks by terrorists ripped through the London transit system in England, killing 52 and injuring more than 700 others.

2020: The United States surpassed 3 million confirmed COVID-19 cases, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

– USA TODAY Network