July 31

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2008 Calendar

[change] Events

781 - The oldest recorded eruption of Mt. Fuji (Traditional Japanese date: July 6, 781)
1009 - Pietro Boccapecora becomes Pope Sergius IV
1423 - Hundred Years War: Battle of Cravant - The French army is defeated at Cravant on the banks of the river Yonne.
1498 - On his third voyage to the Western Hemisphere, Christopher Columbus becomes the first European to discover the island of Trinidad.
1588 - The Spanish Armada is spotted off the coast of England.
1667 - The Treaty of Breda ends the Second Anglo-Dutch War.
1703 - Daniel Defoe is placed in a pillory for the crime of seditious libel after publishing a politically satirical pamphlet, but is pelted with flowers.
1790 - First US patent issued; granted to inventor Samuel Hopkins for a potash process.
1856 - Christchurch, New Zealand chartered as a city.
1917 - The Third Battle of Ypres starts in Flanders.
1919 - German national assembly adopts the Weimar constitution (to enter into force August 14)
1930 - The radio mystery program The Shadow airs for the first time.
1936 - The International Olympic Committee announces that the 1940 Summer Olympics were to be held in Tokyo. However, the games were given back to the IOC after the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out, and were eventually cancelled altogether because of World War II.
1941 - Holocaust: Under instructions from Adolf Hitler, Nazi official Hermann Göring, orders SS general Reinhard Heydrich to "submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution of the Jewish question."
1945 - Pierre Laval, fugitive former leader of Vichy France, surrenders to Allied soldiers in Austria.
1948 - At Idlewild Field in New York, New York International Airport (later renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport) is dedicated.
1951 - Japan Airlines is established.
1954 - First ascent of K2, by an Italian expedition led by Ardito Desio.
1956 - Jim Laker sets extraordinary record at Old Trafford in the fourth Test of taking nineteen wickets in a first-class match (the previous best was seventeen.
1961 - At Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts, the first All-Star Game tie in major league baseball history occurs when the game is stopped in the 9th inning due to rain.
1964 - Ranger program: Ranger 7 sends back the first close-up photographs of the moon, with images 1,000 times clearer than anything ever seen from earth-bound telescopes).
1971 - Apollo program: Apollo 15 astronauts become the first to ride in a lunar rover.
1973 - A Delta Air Lines jetliner crashes while landing in fog at Logan Airport, Boston, Massachusetts killing 89
1975 - In Detroit, Michigan, Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa is reported missing.
1976 - NASA releases the famous Face on Mars photo, taken by Viking 1
1987 - A rare, class F-4 tornado rips through Edmonton, Alberta, killing 27 people and causing $330 million in damage.
1992 - A Thai Airways Airbus A300-310 crashes into mountain south of Kathmandu, Nepal killing 113.
1996 - MIL-STD-1750A is declared inactive for use in new designs.
1999 - NASA intentionally crashes the Lunar Prospector spacecraft into the Moon, thus ending its mission to detect frozen water on the moon's surface.
2003 - WON is shut down.