2 juli

A young Kongolese noblewoman who said Saint Anthony spoke through her preached reunion of the divided kingdom under a restored capital. King Pedro IV had her burned as a heretic, with Capuchin approval; her followers helped him reunite Kongo.

The Lee Resolution passed with twelve colonies in favour and New York abstaining. John Adams expected this to be the day Americans celebrated: “The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America.”

Its new constitution gave the vote to “all inhabitants” worth fifty pounds. Unmarried women and widows who qualified did vote, until the legislature limited the vote to white men in 1807.

The 1776 state constitution gave the vote to “all inhabitants” of full age worth fifty pounds, and a 1790 election law wrote “he or she”. Unmarried women and widows who met the test voted, as did some free Black men, until an 1807 law limited the vote to “free, white male citizens”.

Vesey, a free carpenter who had bought himself out of slavery with a lottery prize, was convicted of planning a rising in Charleston. Thirty-five men were hanged, and the city tore down the African Methodist church where he had preached.

Fifty-three captives, taken illegally from Mendeland to Havana, rose on the schooner carrying them along the coast of Cuba. Led by Sengbe Pieh (Joseph Cinqué), they killed the captain and the cook and ordered the two Spanish owners to sail for Africa; the owners steered north by night. After two…

Charles Guiteau, a disappointed office-seeker, shot him in the waiting room as he left for a summer trip. Doctors probing for the bullet with unwashed hands likely did more harm than the wound; he lived 79 more days.

Maurice Garin, a chimney sweep turned champion, rode 467 kilometres through the night and reached Lyon at about nine in the morning, one minute ahead of Émile Pagie.

Still under Lvov, but with six socialist ministers from the Soviet’s parties, among them the SR leader Viktor Chernov at agriculture and the Menshevik Irakli Tsereteli. Kerensky moved to the war ministry. It broke up when the Kadet ministers quit over autonomy for Ukraine.

Women voted at 21 on the same terms as men, and made up more than half the electorate. Emmeline Pankhurst had died on 14 June, three weeks before the Act became law.

On the longest leg of a round-the-world flight, from Lae in New Guinea to tiny Howland Island, Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan lost radio contact with the Coast Guard ship waiting there. No trace of them was ever confirmed.

Norman Granz, a young producer, staged a jam session in a Los Angeles concert hall to raise money for the defence of Mexican American youths in the Sleepy Lagoon case. His touring concerts that grew out of it wrote integrated seating into their contracts and paid musicians far better than the…

The Senate passed it 73 to 27 and the House accepted the Senate’s version 289 to 126. Johnson signed that evening in the East Room. It outlawed segregation in hotels, restaurants, theatres and other public places, and discrimination in employment by race, colour, religion, sex or national origin.

The first rock concerts in a hall built for martial arts, and to many Japanese a desecration. Nationalists threatened the band, so they were kept in their hotel and thousands of police filled the hall; the audience sat so quietly the band could hear how out of tune they were.

Europe’s first deep-space mission, named after the painter who put a comet in his Nativity in 1305. After Halley it became the first craft to visit two comets, passing Grigg–Skjellerup in July 1992.

Colombia’s defender had scored an own goal in a 2–1 defeat by the United States, which put his team out. Ten days later he was shot six times outside a bar in Medellín. A bodyguard for a group of gamblers was convicted of the murder.

Foreign money had poured into Thai, Malaysian, Indonesian and Korean property and banks, much of it borrowed in dollars against currencies pegged to the dollar. When the pegs broke, the debts doubled overnight in local money.

After spending most of its reserves defending a rate of about 25 baht to the dollar, the Bank of Thailand let it go. By January the baht had lost more than half its value, and the crisis jumped to Indonesia, Malaysia and Korea.

In the last minute of extra time Luis Suárez handled on the goal line to stop the goal that would have made Ghana Africa’s first semi-finalist. He was sent off, Asamoah Gyan hit the bar with the penalty, and Uruguay won the shoot-out.