July 7
1754 - Kings College opened in New York City. It was renamed Columbia College 30 years later.
1846 - U.S. annexation of California was proclaimed at Monterey after the surrender of a Mexican garrison.
1862 - The first railroad post office was tested on the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad in Missouri.
1885 - G. Moore Peters patented the cartridge-loading machine.
1917 - Aleksandr Kerensky formed a provisional government in Russia.
1920 - A device known as the radio compass was used for the first time on a U.S. Navy airplane near Norfolk, VA.
1930 - Construction began on Boulder Dam, later Hoover Dam, on the Colorado River.
1937 - Japanese forces invaded China.
1946 - Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini was canonized as the first American saint.
1949 - "Dragnet" was first heard on NBC radio.
1950 - The U.N. Security Council authorized military aid for South Korea.
1969 - Canada's House of Commons gave final approval to a measure that made the French language equal to English throughout the national government.
1981 - U.S. President Reagan announced he was nominating Arizona Judge Sandra Day O'Connor to become the first female justice on the U.S. Supreme Court.
1983 - Eleven-year-old Samantha Smith of Manchester, Maine, left for a visit to the Soviet Union at the personal invitation of Soviet leader Yuri V. Andropov.
1987 - Public testimony at the Iran-Contra hearing began.
1994 - Amazon.com, Inc. was founded in Seattle, Washington under the name "Cadabra."
1998 - A jury in Santa Monica, CA, convicted Mikail Markhasev of murdering Ennis Cosby, Bill Cosby's only son, during a roadside robbery.
1999 - In Sierra Leone, President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah and rebel leader Foday Sankoh signed a pact to end the nation's civil war.
2000 - Cisco Systems Inc. announced that it would buy Netiverse Inc. for $210 million in stock. It was the 13th time Cisco had purchased a company in 2000.
2000 - Amazon.com announced that they had sold almost 400,000 copies of "Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire," making it the biggest selling book in e-tailing history.
2003 - In Liberia, a team of U.S. military experts arrived at the U.S. embassy compound to assess whether to deploy troops as part of a peacekeeping force in the country.
2017 - The first Tesla Model 3 rolled off the assembly line.
