On this day

In 1877, striking railroad workers rioted in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The riot occurred early on during the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, a protracted strike wave that began on July 14, 1877 at Martinsburg, West Virginia in response to a Baltimore and Ohio Railroad wage cut. The strike eventually spread westward while the strikers often confronted armed vigilantes, local police, state militia and federal troops in addition to the legal and political opposition of the federal and local governments directly touched by the strikers.

In 1899, the novelist Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illinois.

In 1925, a jury in Dayton, Tennessee found John T. Scopes, a biology teacher, guilty of the crime of teaching evolutionary biology to his students. The presiding judge fined Scopes $100 for his crime. The trial was famous at the time and remains so today. The trial is often called the Scopes Monkey Trial and stands as a significant cultural and political defeat for America's Christian fundamentalists.

In 1949, the United States Senate ratified the North Atlantic Treaty, a pact that would soon bring the NATO (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) into being.

In 1954, the Geneva Conference (1954) partitioned Vietnam into two separate states, a cleavage which set the stage for the catastrophic Vietnam War of the 1960s and 1970s.

In 1972, the Provisional Irish Republican Army executed the Bloody Friday bombing action in Belfast, killing nine and injuring 103.