On This Day for July 4 - Declaration of Independence approved by Second Continental Congress, Vivekananda is featured, and more

Created: 2020-07-04 10:02 Updated: 2020-07-04 10:02 Notebook: On this Day in History

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July 04

FEATURED BIOGRAPHY

Vivekananda

FEATURED EVENT

1776

Declaration of Independence approved by Second Continental Congress

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MORE EVENTS ON THIS DAY

2012: Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN announced that they had detected an interesting signal that was likely from a Higgs boson. [ Take our science quiz.]

1976: British punk rock band the Clash gave their first public performance, opening for the Sex Pistols in a pub in Sheffield, England. [ Test your knowledge of musical groups.]

1976: An Israeli commando squad completed its raid on Entebbe, Uganda, rescuing 103 hostages from a French jet airliner that had been hijacked en route from Israel to France.

1946: The Republic of the Philippines was proclaimed an independent country, with Manuel Roxas as its first president. [Sort fact from fiction in our Southeast Asia quiz.]

1939: On an appreciation day in his honour, American baseball player Lou Gehrig, who had been forced to retire months earlier due to ALS , gave a memorable speech in which he claimed to be “the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” [How much do you know about baseball?]

1910: In what was billed as the “Fight of the Century,” African American boxer Jack Johnson defeated James Jackson Jeffries , who was considered the “Great White Hope”; his victory led to nationwide celebrations by African Americans that were occasionally met by violence from whites, resulting in more than 20 deaths across the country. [Test your knowledge of sports.]

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ALSO BORN ON THIS DAY

1872

Calvin Coolidge
president of United States

1804

Nathaniel Hawthorne
American writer

1902

Meyer Lansky
American gangster

1807

Giuseppe Garibaldi
Italian revolutionary

1924

Eva Marie Saint
American actress