Neat Facts (I'm listing more than 3 - too many cool things happened on my birthday):
- 1776 - The Continental Congress adopts a resolution severing ties with Great Britain, though a formal Declaration of Independence is not adopted until July 4.
- 1839 - Twenty miles off the coast of Cuba, 53 rebelling African slaves led by Joseph Cinque take over the slave ship Amistad.
- 1937 - Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappear over the Pacific Ocean while attempting to make the first round-the-world flight at the equator.
- 1947 - An object speculated to be a UFO crashes near Roswell, New Mexico, though the United States Air Force claims it is a weather balloon.
- 1964 - U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act into law.
- 1976 - North and South Vietnam, divided since 1954, reunite to form the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.
- 1979 - The first U.S. coin to honor a woman, the Susan B. Anthony dollar, is introduced.
Two births:
- 1925 - Medgar Evers, American civil rights activist (d. 1963)
- 1946 - Richard Axel, American scientist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
One death:
- 2005 - Ernest Lehman, American screenwriter (b. 1915) of such classics as The King and I (1956), North by Northwest (1959), The Sound of Music (1965) and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)
