This is the 183rd day of the year...

[msmoon]

Beware, for I am: Awake

I know that, because I am a looser -.-

 

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On This Day: Sunday July 2, 2006

This is the 183rd day of the year, with 182 days remaining in 2006.

Fact of the Day: Tour de France

The Tour de France, the most prestigious road bicycle race in the world, takes place for three weeks in July. The Tour de France was established in 1903 by Henri Desgrange and covers some 2,235 miles, usually in 20 stages of one day each.

Holidays

• Feast day of Saints Processus and Martinian, St. Monegundis, and St. Otto of Bamberg.

Events

• 1776 - The Continental Congress passed a resolution saying that "these United Colonies are, and of right, ought to be, Free and Independent States."
• 1777 - Vermont became the first American colony to abolish slavery.
• 1788 - The Constitution of the United States of America went into effect after nine states ratified it.
• 1839 - Africans on the Cuban schooner Amistad rose up against their captors, killing two crewmembers and seizing control of the ship, which had been transporting them to a life of slavery on a sugar plantation at Puerto Príncipe, Cuba.
• 1850 - The gas mask was patented by B.J. Lane of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• 1857 - New York City's first elevated railroad opened for business.
• 1881 - Only four months into his administration, President James A. Garfield was shot at the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Depot in Washington, D.C.; he died in September from his wounds.
• 1890 - Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act.
• 1900 - Count Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin successfully demonstrated the world's first rigid airship.
• 1900 - The second modern Olympic Games opened in Paris.
• 1926 - The United States Army Air Corps was created.
• 1937 - Aviator Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over the Pacific Ocean while attempting to make the first round-the-world flight at the equator.
• 1947 - A purported Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) crashed near Roswell, New Mexico. This report has been the subject of controversy ever since.
• 1955 - "The Lawrence Welk Show" premiered on television.
• 1964 - U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964; it was sweeping legislation prohibiting racial discrimination in employment and education, and outlawing racial segregation in public facilities.
• 1976 - The Supreme Court ruled the death penalty was not inherently cruel or unusual.
• 2002 - American Steve Fossett became the first person to fly a balloon solo around the world.

Births

• 1855 - Clarence Barron, American financial editor and publisher.
• 1877 - Hermann Hesse, German poet and novelist.
• 1905 - Jean Rene Lacoste, French tennis player, founder of Lacoste tennis clothing.
• 1908 - Thurgood Marshall, first black U.S. Supreme Court Justice.

Deaths

• 1566 - Nostradamus, French physician and astrologer.
• 1961 - Ernest Hemingway, American novelist and short-story writer.
• 1997 - Jimmy Stewart, American actor.

 

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MM