On July 14, 1798, one of the most egregious breaches of the U.S. Constitution in history becomes federal law when Congress passes the Sedition Act, endangering liberty in the fragile new nation. While the United States engaged in naval hostilities with Revolutionary France, known as the Quasi-War, Alexander Hamilton and congressional Federalists took advantage of […]

John Ringo, the famous gun-fighting gentleman, is found dead in Turkey Creek Canyon, Arizona. Romanticized in both life and death, John Ringo was supposedly a Shakespeare-quoting gentleman whose wit was as quick as his gun. Some believed he was college educated, and his sense of honor and courage was sometimes compared to that of a […]

On July 14, 1918, Quentin Roosevelt, a pilot in the United States Air Service and the fourth son of former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt, is shot down and killed by a German Fokker plane over the Marne River in France. The young Roosevelt was engaged to Flora Payne Whitney, the granddaughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt, one […]

On July 14, 1931, Governor Warren Green of South Dakota makes an urgent plea to President Herbert Hoover for assistance for his state’s farmers, whose lives and livelihoods were being threatened by a catastrophic insect invasion. “Grasshoppers have utterly destroyed all crops in 11,000 square miles of South Dakota,” the governor wrote in his emergency […]

Relations between the Soviet Union and China reach the breaking point as the two governments engage in an angry ideological debate about the future of communism. The United States, for its part, was delighted to see a wedge being driven between the two communist superpowers. In mid-1963, officials from the Soviet Union and the People’s […]

Early on the morning of July 14, 1970, the Young Lords, a predominantly Puerto Rican group of community activists in New York City, storm Lincoln Hospital in the South Bronx and barricade themselves inside. The Young Lords claimed the hospital as their own, placing a Puerto Rican flag on the roof and flying signs from […]

On July 14, 2016, thousands gathered along the seafront of Nice, France to celebrate Bastille Day—the country’s independence holiday. The mood turned from joy to horror, when a white truck barreled through a pedestrian-filled closed street. In the end, 86 were dead, including 10 children, and over 400 spectators were left injured. While fireworks shot […]