July 2
1298 - An army under Albert of Austria defeated and killed Adolf of Nassua near Worms, Germany.
1625 - The Spanish army took Breda, Spain, after nearly a year of siege.
1644 - Lord Cromwell crushed the Royalists at the Battle of Marston Moor near York, England.
1747 - Marshall Saxe led the French forces to victory over an Anglo-Dutch force under the Duke of Cumberland at the Battle of Lauffeld.
1776 - Richard Henry Lee’s resolution that the American colonies "are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States" was adopted by the Continental Congress.
1850 - Prussia agreed to pull out of Schlewig and Holstein, Germany.
1850 - Benjamin Lane patented a gas mask with a breathing apparatus. (Patent US7476 A)
1857 - New York City’s first elevated railroad officially opened for business.
1858 - Czar Alexander II freed the serfs working on imperial lands.
1881 - Charles J. Guiteau fatally wounded U.S. President James A. Garfield in Washington, DC.
1890 - The U.S. Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act.
1926 - The U.S. Congress established the Army Air Corps.
1937 - American aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart disappeared in the Central Pacific during an attempt to fly around the world at the equator.
1939 - At Mount Rushmore, Theodore Roosevelt's face was dedicated.
1944 - American bombers, as part of Operation Gardening, dropped land mines, leaflets and bombs on German-occupied Budapest.
1947 - An object crashed near Roswell, NM. The U.S. Army Air Force insisted it was a weather balloon, but eyewitness accounts led to speculation that it might have been an alien spacecraft.
1962 - Wal-Mart Discount City opened in Rogers, Arkansas. It was the first Walmart
store.
1964 - U.S. President Johnson signed the "Civil Rights Act of 1964" into law. The act made it illegal in the U.S. to discriminate against others because of their race.
1967 - The U.S. Marine Corps launched Operation Buffalo in response to the North Vietnamese Army's efforts to seize the Marine base at Con Thien.
1976 - The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the death penalty was not inherently cruel or unusual.
1976 - North Vietnam and South Vietnam were reunited.
1979 - The U.S. Mint officially released the Susan B. Anthony coin in Rochester, NY.
1980 - U.S. President Jimmy Carter reinstated draft registration for males 18 years of age.
1981 - Soyuz T-6 returned to Earth.
1982 - Larry Walters ("Lawnchair Larry") took flight in his homeade airship that consisted of a lawnchair with 45 helium-filled weather balloons attached to it. He stayed in flight for about an hour.
1985 - General Motors announced that it was installing electronic road maps as an option in some of its higher-priced cars.
1995 - "Forbes" magazine reported that Microsoft's chairman, Bill Gates, was the worth $12.9 billion, making him the world's richest man.
1998 - Cable News Network (CNN) retracted a story that alleged that U.S. commandos had used nerve gas to kill American defectors during the Vietnam War.
2000 - In Mexico, Vicente Fox Quesada of the National Action Party (PAN) defeated Francisco Labastida Ochoa of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in the presidential election. The PRI had controlled the presidency in Mexico since the party was founded in 1929.
