Wanted poster for Jesse James

Today in History

• Arsonists burn one of the original Seven Wonders of the World, the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus (356 BCE)
• American Civil War: The First Battle of Bull Run, the first major battle of the war, takes place near Mansassas, Virginia (1861)
• In what is thought to be the first western shootout, Wild Bill Hickok shoots and kills Davis Tutt (1865)
• Jesse James and the James-Younger Gang conduct the first successful train robbery in the American Old West (1873)
• Louis Rigolly becomes the first human being to break the 100 mph barrier on land (1904)
• Tennessee high school biology teacher John T. Scopes is found guilty of teaching evolution to schoolchildren and is fined $100 (1925)
• Malcolm Campbell becomes the first human being to exceed 150 mph on land (1925)
• Vietnam is partitioned into North and South Vietnam (1954)
• The last major league baseball team to integrate, the Boston Red Sox, fields their first African-American player, Pumps Green (1959)
• Astronaut Gus Grissom becomes the second American in space aboard the Mercury Liberty Bell 7 mission (1961)
• Egypt’s Aswan High Dam is completed (1970)
• Vostok Station, Antarctica, records the world’s lowest temperature in an inhabited location, -89.2° C (-128.6° F) (1983)
• The last NASA Space Shuttle mission, STS-135, lands (2011)
• Erden Eruç completes the first human-powered circumnavigation of the Earth (2012)

Birthdays

• Paul Reuter, journalist who founded Reuters (1816)
• Hart Crane, poet (1899)
• Ernest Hemingway, author (1899)
• Marshall McLuhan, media theorist (1911)
• Isaac Stern, violinist and conductor (1920)
• Kay Starr, singer (1922)
• Don Knotts, actor and comedian (1924)
• John Gardner, author (1933)
• Jonathan Miller, actor and author, known for Beyond the Fringe (1934)
• Janet Reno, US Attorney-General (1938)
• Edward Herrmann, actor (1943)
• Ken Starr, US Solicitor-General and special prosecutor (1946)
• Cat Stevens (Yusuf Islam), singer-songwriter (1948)
• Garry Trudeau, cartoonist who created Doonesbury (1948)
• Robin Williams, actor and comedian (1951)
• Jon Lovitz, comedian and actor (1957)
• Brandi Chastain, soccer player (1968)
• Josh Hartnett, actor (1978)

Deaths

• Robert Burns, poet (1796)
• Owen Wister, author (1938)
• Claus von Stauffenberg, German officer, leader of the Bomb Plot (1944*)
• Jimmie Foxx, baseball player (1967)
• Basil Rathbone, actor (1967)
• Dave Garroway, founding anchor of The Today Show (1982)
• Alan Shepard, astronaut (1998)
• Robert Young, actor (1998)
• Jerry Goldsmith, composer (2004)
• Long John Baldry, singer and voice actor (2005)
• E. L. Doctorow, author (2015)

* The “Bomb Plot” assassination attempt is the starting point for my alternate history novel with Douglas Niles, Fox on the Rhine.

Holidays and Celebrations

• Legal Drinking Age Day (US)
• Liberation Day (Guam)
• National Bridal Sale Day (US)
• National Day (Belgium)
• Racial Harmony Day (Singapore)
• Kazanskaya (Russia, also observed November 4)

July 21 is the 202nd day of the year (203rd in leap years). There are 163 days remaining until the end of the year.