On this day for the United States
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Events
- 1787 – Sixty proof sheets of the Constitution of the United States are delivered to the Constitutional Convention.
- 1819 – Norwich University founded in Vermont as the first private military school in the United States.
- 1862 – American Civil War: The Confederate ironclad CSS Arkansas is scuttled on the Mississippi River after suffering damage in a battle with USS Essex near Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
- 1890 – At Auburn Prison in New York, murderer William Kemmler becomes the first person to be executed by electric chair.
- 1901 – Kiowa land in Oklahoma is opened for white settlement, effectively dissolving the contiguous reservation.
- 1909 – Alice Ramsey and three friends become the first women to complete a transcontinental auto trip.
- 1912 – The Bull Moose Party meets at the Chicago Coliseum.
- 1914 – Denis Patrick Dowd Jr. enlists in the French Foreign Legion, becoming the first American to fight in World War I.
- 1926 – In New York, the Warner Brothers' Vitaphone system premieres with the movie Don Juan starring John Barrymore.
- 1926 – Harry Houdini performs his greatest feat, spending 91 minutes underwater in a sealed tank before escaping.
- 1942 – Queen Wilhelmina is the first reigning queen to address a joint session of the United States Congress.
- 1945 – World War II: Hiroshima is devastated when an atomic bomb, "Little Boy", is dropped by the United States B–29 Enola Gay. Around 70,000 people were killed instantly, and some tens of thousands died in subsequent years due to burns and radiation poisoning.
- 1956 – After going bankrupt in 1955, the American broadcaster DuMont Television Network has its final broadcast, a boxing match from St. Nicholas Arena.
- 1964 – Prometheus, the world's oldest tree, is cut down.
- 1965 – US President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into United States law.
- 1966 – Braniff Airlines Flight 250 crashes in Falls City, NE killing all 42 on board.
- 1991 – Tim Berners-Lee releases files describing his idea for the World Wide Web. WWW debuts as a publicly available service on the Internet.
- 1996 – NASA announces that the ALH 84001 meteorite, thought to originate from Mars, contains evidence of primitive life–forms.
- 2001 – President's Daily Brief entitled Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US delivered to George W. Bush. This document foreshadowed the September 11 attacks.