July 20

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July 20 is the 201st day (202nd in leap years) of the year in the Gregorian Calendar, with 164 days remaining.

1 Events
2 Births
3 Deaths
4 Holidays and observances
5 External links

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Events

514 - Pope Hormisdas assumes the papacy of the Roman Catholic Church.
1304 - English King Edward I of England takes the last rebel stronghold in the Wars of Scottish Independence, Stirling Castle.
1402 - battle of Ankara. Timur, ruler of Timurid Empire, defeated forces of the Ottoman Empire sultan Bayezid I
1618 - Pluto reached, according to sophisticated mathematical calculations, its second most recent aphelion. The next one occurred in 1866, and the following one will occur in 2113.
1712 - The Riot Act takes effect in the Great Britain.
1738 - North America: French explorer Pierre Gaultier de Varennes et de la Vérendrye reaches the western shore of Lake Michigan.
1810 - Citizens of Bogotá, Colombia declare independence from Spain.
1833 - An Anti-Mormon mob in Independence, Missouri, destroys the printing press for the Book of Commandments, now among the most valuable 19th century books.
1861 - American Civil War: The Congress of the Confederate States of America begins sitting in Richmond, Virginia.
1864 - American Civil War: Battle of Peachtree Creek - Near Atlanta, Georgia, Confederate forces led by General John Bell Hood unsuccessfully attack Union troops under General William T. Sherman.
1866 - Austro-Prussian War: Battle of Lissa - The Austrian navy, led by Admiral Wilhelm von Tegetthoff, defeats the Italian navy near the island of Vis.
1871 - British Columbia joins the confederation of Canada.
1872 - The United States Patent Office awards the first patent for wireless telegraphy to Mahlon Loomis.
1877 - Rioting in Baltimore, Maryland by Baltimore and Ohio Railroad workers is put down by the state militia, resulting in nine deaths.
1881 - Indian Wars:Sioux Chief Sitting Bull leads the last of his fugitive people in surrender to United States troops at Fort Buford, Montana
1885 - The Football Association legalises professionalism in football under pressure from the British Football Association.
1907 - A train wreck on the Pere Marquette Railroad near Salem, Michigan kills thirty and injures seventy more.
1915 - A strike by coal miners in Wales is settled.
1916 - World War I: In Armenia, Russian troops capture Gumiskhanek.
1917 - World War I: The Corfu Declaration, which leads to the creation of the post-war Kingdom of Yugoslavia, is signed by the Yugoslav Committee and Kingdom of Serbia.
1917 - World War I: In the United States, the first military draft numbers are drawn for World War I.
1917 - Alexander Kerensky becomes Prime Minister and President of the provisional government and survives an assassination attempt.
1918 - World War I: German troops cross the Marne.
1920 - Boxer Jack Johnson is arrested near San Diego, California as he crosses the border from Tijuana, Mexico after being on the run for five years after his conviction under the Mann Act.
1921 - The Amatian oil fields 129 km south of Tampico, Mexico burn, causing millions of dollars in damage.
1921 - Air mail service begins between New York City and San Francisco.
1922 - The League of Nations awards mandates of Togoland to France and Tanganyika to the United Kingdom.
1924 - Teheran, Persia comes under martial law after the American vice consul, Robert Imbrie, is killed by a religious mob enraged by rumors he had poisoned a fountain and killed several people.
1924 - Americans Helen Wills and Vincent Richards win the Olympic tennis championships in Paris.
1924 - On a sweltering day, Coney Island in New York City breaks its attendance record as over 600,000 try to escape the heat.
1926 - A convention of the Methodist Church votes to allow women to become priests.
1927 - Michael I becomes king of Romania at age five upon the death of his grandfather Ferdinand I.
1928 - The government of Hungary issues a decree ordering Gypsies to end their nomadic ways, settle permanently in one place, and subject themselves to the same laws and taxes as other Hungarians.
1929 - Soviet troops attempt to cross the Amur River into Manchuria near Blagovestchensk as tensions mount between the Soviet Union and China.
1929 - The French Parliament narrowly approves President Raymond Poincaré's plan to reschedule the country's foreign debts.
1930 - Maxim Litvinov is named the Soviet Union's Commissar of Foreign Affairs.
1931 - Former Interior Secretary Albert Fall enters state prison in Santa Fe, New Mexico on his bribery conviction from the Teapot Dome scandal.
1931 - Three are dead in rioting in Seville, Spain, after police clash with marchers in a funeral parade for a syndicalist killed by the police days earlier.
1932 - German president Paul von Hindenburg signs a decree ordering Franz von Papen to take control of the Prussian state government and declares martial law.
1932 - In Washington, D.C., police fire tear gas on World War I veterans part of the Bonus Expeditionary Force who attempt to march to the White House.
1932 - Crowds in the capitals of Bolivia and Paraguay demand their governments declare war on the other after fighting on their border.
1933 - Vice-Chancellor of Germany Franz von Papen and Vatican Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli sign a concordat on behalf of their respective nations.
1933 - In London, 500,000 march against anti-Semitism.
1933 - Germany: Two-hundred Jewish merchants are arrested in Nuremberg and paraded through the streets.
1934 - Labor unrest in the United States, as police in Minneaspolis fire upon striking truck drivers, wounding fifty; Seattle police led by the mayor police fire tear gas on and club 2,000 striking longshoremen, and the governor of Oregon calls out the National Guard to break a strike on the Portland docks.
1935 - Switzerland: A Royal Dutch Airlines plane en route from Milan to Frankfurt crashes into a Swiss mountain, killing thirteen.
1935 - Riots between Muslims and Sikhs over a mosque in Lahore, India leave eleven dead.
1936 - The Montreux Convention is signed in Switzerland, authorizing Turkey to fortify the Dardanelles and Bosphorus but guaranteeing free passage to ships of all nations in peacetime.
1937 - Two black men accused of stabbing a policeman are taken by a mob from the county jail in Tallahassee, Florida and lynched.
1938 - The Justice Department files suit in New York City against the motion picture industry charging violations of anti-trust law. The case would eventually result in a break-up of the industry in 1948.
1940 - Denmark leaves the League of Nations.
1940 - Billboard magazine publishes its first "Music Popularity Chart"; the first number one song is Frank Sinatra's "I'll Never Smile Again".
1940 - President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Hatch Act, limiting political activity by Federal government employees.
1940 - Admiral Jean Decoux is named governor of French Indochina by Marshal Philippe Pétain.
1941 - Soviet leader Joseph Stalin consolidates the Commissariats of Home Affairs and National Security to form the NKVD and names Lavrenti Beria its chief.
1942 - World War II: Red Army troops take bridgeheads over the Don River near Voronezh.
1942 - World War II: The first unit of the Women's Army Corps begins training in Des Moines, Iowa.
1943 - World War II: American and Canadian troops conquer Enna on Sicily.
1944 - World War II: Adolf Hitler survives an assassination attempt (known as the July 20 Plot) led by German Army Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg.
1944 - World War II: American troops land on Guam near Port Apra.
1944 - In Bombay, India, health authorities announce a cholera epidemic has killed 34,000 in three months.
1944 - The Democratic Party nominates Franklin D. Roosevelt for a fourth term as president.
1944 - Fifty are hurt in rioting in front of the presidential palace in Mexico City.
1945 - The U.S. Congress approves the Bretton Woods Agreement.
1946 - World War II: The U.S. Congress's Pearl Harbor Committee says Franklin D. Roosevelt was completely blameless for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and calls for a unified command structure in the armed forces.
1946 - A grand jury indicts nineteen members of the Michigan state legislature for bribery for obstructing a banking reform bill.
1947 - Police in Burma arrest former Prime Minister U Saw and 19 others on charges of assassinating Prime Minister U Aung San and seven members of his cabinet.
1947 - The viceroy of India says the people of the Northwest Frontier Province overwhelmingly voted the previous day to join Pakistan rather than India.
1948 - President Harry S. Truman issues the first peacetime military draft in the United States amid increasing tensions with the Soviet Union.
1948 - In New York City, twelve leaders of the Communist Party USA are indicted under the Smith Act including William Z. Foster and Gus Hall.
1948 - Syngman Rhee is elected president of South Korea by parliament.
1949 - Israel and Syria sign a truce to end their nineteen-month war.
1949 - Bulgaria: Parliament elects Vassil Kolarov prime minister, replacing Georgi Dimitrov.
1950 - Belgium: Parliament authorizes king Léopold III to return from exile in Austria.
1950 - Korean War: North Korea attacks the temporary South Korean capital, Taejon.
1950 - Cold War: In Philadelphia, Harry Gold pleads guilty to spying for the Soviet Union by passing secrets from atomic scientist Klaus Fuchs.
1950 - A new federal system for Indonesia's government is agreed on to take effect August 17.
1951 - King Abdullah I of Jordan is assassinated while attending Friday prayers in Jerusalem.
1952 - The 15th Olympic Games begin in Helsinki, Finland.
1953 - The United Nations Economic and Social Council votes to make UNICEF a permanent agency.
1954 - Germany: Otto John, head of West Germany's secret service, defects to East Germany.
1954 - At Geneva, Switzerland, an armistice is signed that ends fighting in Vietnam and divides the country along the 17th parallel.
1955 - China shells Taiwan's islands Quemoy and Matsu.
1955 - Michigan: The United Auto Workers is indicted under the Federal Corrupt Practices Act for its activities in Michigan in the 1954 elections.
1956 - A nationwide civil defense drill, "Operation Alert", is held, simulating a Soviet nuclear strike on seventy-five American cities. As part of the exercise, 10,000 bureaucrats and officials leave Washington, D.C., for bunkers around the capital.
1956 - In Mukden, Pu Yi, the former Emperor of China, testifies in the war crimes trials of twenty-two Japanese, the first time Pu Yi's whereabouts had been known since 1946.
1957 - The Soviet Union closes Peter the Great Bay, which provides access to Vladivostok, to foreign ships.
1958 - Twenty-six are dead in an explosion at a military base near Kokin Breg, Yugoslavia.
1958 - Jordan suspends diplomatic relations with the United Arab Republic after it recognizes the new government of Iraq.
1958 - Baseball: Jim Bunning of the Detroit Tigers pitches a no-hitter against the Boston Red Sox.
1959 - The Organization for European Economic Cooperation admits Spain.
1959 - Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, arrives in Paris for a state visit with President Charles de Gaulle.
1960 - Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) elects Sirimavo Bandaranaike Prime Minister, the world's first elected female head of government.
1960 - The Polaris missile is successfully launched from a submarine, the USS George Washington, for the first time.
1960 - Belgium defends its intervention in the Congo to the United Nations Security Council while the government of the Congo appeals to the Soviet Union to send troops to push back the Belgians. The governments of the United States and France and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization warn the Soviets to stay out of the dispute.
1960 - In Salisbury, Rhodesia, 20,000 protest over police brutality.
1960 - In Lebanon, Saeb Salem is named Prime Minister.
1960 - The head of the Physics Department at the Israel Institute of Technology, Kurt Sitte, is arrested for espionage.
1960 - King Mahendra of Nepal arrives in New Delhi, India, for a state visit, the first stop on a three- month world tour that will include a visit to the United States.
1961 - The United States House of Representatives rejects President John F. Kennedy's proposal to reform the National Labor Relations Board.
1961 - President John F. Kennedy transfers authority for civil defense planning to the Defense Department.
1961 - The Arab League admits Kuwait to membership.
1961 - French military forces break the Tunisian siege of Bizerte.
1962 - Earthquakes in Colombia kill 40.
1964 - Vietnam War: Viet Cong forces attack the capital of Dinh Tuong Province, Cai Be, killing 11 South Vietnamese military personnel and 40 civilians (30 of which are children).
1965 - Lyndon B. Johnson nominates Abe Fortas to the Supreme Court.
1965 - Columbia Records releases Bob Dylan's groundbreaking single "Like a Rolling Stone" to radio stations.
1965 - In Hayneville, Alabama, two civil rights protesters, one a priest and the other a seminarian, are shot by a deputy sheriff. The seminarian dies of his wounds.
1965 - Elias Tsirimokos becomes prime minister of Greece.
1965 - Turkish prime minister Suat Hayri Urguplu returns from a visit to Moscow and announces the Soviet Union will provide aid to his country.
1966 - Prime Minister Harold Wilson announces budget cuts to combat inflation and calls for voluntary wage and price controls.
1967 - French President Charles de Gaulle arrives in the North American enclaves of St. Pierre and Miquelon.
1969 - Apollo Program: Apollo 11 lands on the Moon.
1969 - Cease fire announced between Honduras and El Salvador, 6 days after the beginning of the "Football War"
1971 - President Richard M. Nixon tells Taiwan the United States will continue to sell it arms.
1971 - The Soviet Union says it will support China's admission to the United Nations
1971 - Syria and Jordan's armies exchange fire over the common frontier.
1972 - Netherlands: The cabinet of Prime Minister Barend Biesheuvel resigns in a dispute over the budget.
1972 - Uruguay is crippled by a general strike called to obtain wage increases in the face of high inflation.
1972 - Police in Canberra, Australia, break up a protest by indigenous Australians in front of the Australian Parliament over land reform .
1973 - The United States Senate passes the War Powers Act.
1973 - Vietnam War: In testimony by Assistant Secretary of Defense Jerry Friedheim to the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee, the United States Defense Department admits it lied to U.S. Congress about bombing Cambodia .
1973 - Seventy-three government officials and military officers are charged with conspiracy to overthrow the Greekgovernment.
1973 - Julius Kiano, Kenya's Commerce and Industry Minister, tells Asian-owned businesses to close by the end of the year.
1973 - Palestianian terrorists hijack a Japan Airlines jet en route from Amsterdam to Japan and force it down in Dubai.
1974 - Turkish occupation of Cyprus: Forces from Turkey invade Cyprus after Greek Cypriots' attempt at enosis. NATO's Council praises the United States and the United Kingdom for attempts to settle the dispute. Syria and Egypt put their militaries on alert.
1974 - Reconsidering its decision in June to create nude beaches, the Los Angeles city council votes to ban nudity on all public beaches after a public outcry.
1975 - India expels three reporters from The Times, The Daily Telegraph, and Newsweek because they refused to sign a pledge to abide by government censorship.
1976 - The Viking 1 lander successfully lands on Mars.
1976 - Vietnam War: The United States military completes its troop withdrawal from Thailand.
1977 - Johnstown is hit by a flash flood that kills eighty and causes $350 million in damage.
1977 - The Central Intelligence Agency releases documents under the Freedom of Information Act revealing it had engaged in mind control experiments.
1979 - Diana Nyad swims the sixty miles from the Bahamas to Florida.
1979 - American President Jimmy Carter says troop withdrawals from South Korea will cease and the remainder will stay for at least two years.
1980 - The United Nations Security Council votes 14-0 that member states should not recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
1982 - The Provisional IRA detonates two bombs in Hyde Park and Regents Park in central London, killing eight soldiers, wounding forty-seven people, and leading to the deaths of seven horses.
1983 - The United States House of Representatives censures two of its members, Gerry Studds (D-Massachusetts) and Daniel B. Crane (R-Illinois), for having sex with congressional pages: Studds for having sex with a sixteen-year-old male page in 1973 and Crane for having sex with a seventeen-year-old female page in 1980.
1983 - The Israeli cabinet votes to withdraw troops from Beirut but to remain in southern Lebanon.
1984 - Officials of the Miss America pageant ask Vanessa Lynn Williams to quit after Penthouse published nude photos of her.
1985 - The main ship wreck site of the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha (which sank in 1622) is found 40 miles off the coast of Key West, Florida by treasure hunters who soon begin to raise $400 million in coins and silver.
1985 - The government of Aruba passes legislation to secede from the Netherlands Antilles.
1986 - In South Africa, police fire tear gas into a church service for families of those held under the government's emergency decrees.
1986 - In Cambridge, Gerald Amirault of the Fell Acres Day School is convicted of molesting nine children.
1987 - President Ronald Reagan appoints Larry Kramer, co-founder of Gay Men's Health Crisis, to a federal panel on AIDS.
1987 - President Ronald Reagan signs legislation, Public Law 100-75, designating August 3 "International Special Olympics Day".
1989 - Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe's show opens at Washington, D.C.'s Project for the Arts after the Smithsonian Institution's Corcoran Gallery cancels it.
1989 - The United States Senate voted 73-26 to privatize the Energy Department's uranium enrichment program by creating a private company, the United States Enrichment Corporation.
1989 - Burma's ruling junta puts opposition leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest.
1990 - Haiti asks the United States to send observers to monitor its upcoming elections.
1990 - A Provisional Irish Republican Army bomb explodes at the International Stock Exchange in London.
1990 - All of Colonel Oliver North's convictions for perjury and other offenses in the Iran Contra affair are overturned by an appeals court.
1991 - The United States Department of Defense begins airlifting supplies to Albania
1992 - Václav Havel resigns as president of Czechoslovakia.
1992 - A TU-154 cargo plane crashes in the suburbs of Tbilisi, Georgia, killing forty.
1993 - 20,000 policemen gather at Wembley Stadium in London to protest pay reforms.
1994 - Israel's Shimon Peres visits Jordan, the highest ranking Israeli official to do so
1994 - Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9's Fragment Q1 hits Jupiter.
1995 - The Regents of the University of California vote to end all affirmative action in the UC system by 1997.
1996 - In Spain, an ETA bomb at an airport kills 35
1997 - In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Serb Democratic Party forces President Biljana Plavšić to resign.
1998 - Two hundred aid workers from CARE International, Doctors Without Borders and other aid groups leave Afghanistan on orders of the Taliban.
1999 - Mercury program: Liberty Bell 7 is raised from the Atlantic Ocean.
1999 - The European Parliament elects Nichole Fontaine its president.
1999 - Falun Gong is officially banned and defined as an "evil cult" (xiejiao) by Chinese government, and a large-scale persecution of its practitioners is launched.
2000 - The leaders of Salt Lake City's bid to win the 2002 Winter Olympics are indicted by a federal grand jury for bribery, fraud, and racketeering.
2000 - In Zimbabwe, Parliament opens its new session and seats opposition members for the first time in a decade.
2000 - Terrorist Carlos the Jackal sues France in the European Court of Human Rights for allegedly torturing him.
2000 - American President Bill Clinton arrives on Okinawa, Japan, for the G8 summit and pledges to the islanders that the United States will reduce the impact American military bases have on their lives.
2001 - The London Stock Exchange goes public.
2002 - Italy: The 27th Annual G8 summit opens in Genoa. An Italian protester in Genoa, Carlo Giuliani, is shot by police.
2002 - The United States Senate confirms Roger L. Gregory as the first black to sit on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
2002 - South America: A fire in a discotheque in Lima, Peru kills over twenty-five.
2003 - Liberia: Fighting between militias controlled by the country's president, Charles Taylor, and rebels continues in Monrovia.
2003 - Richard Sambrook, the Director of BBC News, reveals that David Kelly was the source of claims that Downing Street had "sexed up" the "Dodgy Dossier".
2003 - France: Sixteen people are injured after two bombs explode outside a tax office in Nice.
2003 - Golf: Rookie Ben Curtis, ranked 396th in the world, wins the British Open, the first golfer to win a major golf tournament on his first try in more than ninety years.
2003 - Fourteen people—a American family of twelve who had chartered the plane and the South African crew of two—die when their light plane crashes into Mount Kenya after taking off from Nairobi for Buffalo Springs National Reserve in northern Kenya.
2005 - Canada becomes the fourth country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage, after the bill C-38 receives its Royal Assent.
2005 - In China's Shaanxi province, a coal mine explosion kills two dozen.
2005 - In Yemen, several people die during demonstrations against oil price increases.