July 31

From TheBestLinks.com

July 31 is the 212th day (213th in leap years) of the year in the Gregorian Calendar, with 153 days remaining, as the final day of July.

Table of contents

1 Events

2 Births

3 Deaths

4 Holidays and observances

Events

1423 - Hundred Years War: Battle of Cravant - The French army is defeated at Cravant on the banks of the river Yonne.
1498 - On his third voyage to the Western Hemisphere, Christopher Columbus becomes the first European to discover the island of Trinidad.
1667 - The Treaty of Breda ends the Second Anglo-Dutch War.
1703 - Daniel Defoe is placed in a pillory for the crime of seditious libel after publishing a politically satirical pamphlet but is pelted with flowers.
1790 - First US patent issued; granted to inventor Samuel Hopkins.
1856 - Christchurch, New Zealand chartered as a city.
1917 - The Third Battle of Ypres starts in Flanders.
1919 - German national assembly adopts the Weimar constitution (to enter into force August 14)
1930 - The radio mystery program The Shadow airs for the first time.
1941 - Holocaust: Under instructions from Adolf Hitler, Nazi official Hermann G�ring, orders SS general Reinhard Heydrich to "submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution of the Jewish question."
1945 - Pierre Laval, fugitive former leader of Vichy France, surrenders to Allied soldiers in Austria.
1948 - At Idlewild Field in New York, New York International Airport (later renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport) is dedicated.
1954 - First ascent of K2.
1961 - At Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts, the first All-Star Game tie in major league baseball history occurs when the game is stopped in the 9th inning due to rain.
1964 - Ranger program: Ranger 7 sends back the first close-up photographs of the moon (images are 1,000 times clearer than anything ever seen from earth-bound telescopes).
1971 - Apollo program: Apollo 15 astronauts become the first to ride in a lunar rover.
1973 - A Delta Airlines jetliner crashed while landing in fog at Logan Airport, Boston, Massachusetts killing 89
1975 - In Detroit, Michigan, Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa is reported missing.
1976 - NASA releases the famous Face on Mars photo, taken by Viking 1
1992 - A Thai Airways Airbus A300-310 crashes into mountain south of Kathmandu, Nepal killing 113.
1996 - MIL-STD-1750A was declared inactive for use in new designs.
1999 - NASA intentionally crashes the Lunar Prospector spacecraft into the Moon, thus ending its mission to detect frozen water on the moon's surface.