On July 21, 365, a powerful earthquake off the coast of Greece causes a tsunami that devastates the city of Alexandria, Egypt. Although there were no measuring tools at the time, scientists now estimate that the quake was actually two tremors in succession, the largest of which is thought to have had a magnitude of […]

In what may be the first true western showdown, Wild Bill Hickok shoots Dave Tutt dead in the market square of Springfield, Missouri. Hollywood movies and dime novels notwithstanding, the classic western showdown—also called a walkdown—happened only rarely in the American West. Rather than coolly confronting each other on a dusty street in a deadly […]

On the final day of the so-called “Trial of the Century,” July 21, 1925, schoolteacher John T. Scopes is convicted of violating Tennessee’s law against teaching evolution in public schools. The case debated was never really in doubt; the jury only conferred for a few moments in the hallway before returning to the courtroom with […]

On July 21, 1944, Adolf Hitler takes to the airwaves to announce that the attempt on his life—code-named Operation Valkyrie—has failed and that “accounts will be settled.” Hitler had survived the bomb blast that was meant to take his life. He had suffered punctured eardrums, some burns and minor wounds, but nothing that would keep […]

On July 21, 1960, the German government passes the “Law Concerning the Transfer of the Share Rights in Volkswagenwerk Limited Liability Company into Private Hands,” known informally as the “Volkswagen Law.” Founded in 1937 and originally under the control of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist (Nazi) Party, Volkswagen would eventually grow into Europe’s largest car manufacturer […]

On July 21, 2007, the seventh and final Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is released, with an initial print run of 12 million copies in the United States alone. Like each of the previous Harry Potter novels, Deathly Hallows was slated to be made into a major Hollywood film. The bespectacled […]

On July 21, 2011, NASA’s space shuttle program completes its final, and 135th, mission, when the shuttle Atlantis lands at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. During the program’s 30-year history, its five orbiters—Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour—carried more than 350 people into space and flew more than 500 million miles, and shuttle crews conducted […]