On this date...

First Virginia Assembly 1619

In 1619, In Jamestown, Virginia, the first elected legislative assembly in the New World—the House of Burgesses—convenes in the choir of the town’s church.

In 1792, The city of Baltimore was founded.

In 1777, Brigadier General George Clinton, takes office as the first elected governor of the independent state of New York.

In 1864, at the Battle of the Crater, the Union’s ingenious attempt to break the Confederate lines at Petersburg, Virginia, by blowing up a tunnel that had been dug under the Rebel trenches fails.

In 1866, during the turbulent Reconstruction era after the Civil War, white resistance to African American citizenship turns violent in New Orleans when a white mob kills dozens of African Americans gathering to support a political meeting.

In 1867, Texas Gov. James W. Throckmorton was removed from office by federal military officials on the grounds that he was an "impediment to Reconstruction." Throckmorton was the first Texas governor elected after the Civil War ended. Federal officials appointed Elisha Pease, who had lost the gubernatorial race to Throckmorton a year earlier, as Texas' provisional governor.

In 1932, United States Vice President Charles Curtis declared, “I proclaim open the Olympic Games of Los Angeles, celebrating the tenth Olympiad of the modern era.”

in 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a bill creating a women's auxiliary agency in the Navy known as Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service, or WAVES.

In 1945, The USS Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese submarine shortly after delivering the internal components of the atomic bombs that were later dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some 900 men died, many of whom succumbed to shark attacks, dehydration, and salt poisoning as they awaited rescue.

In 1956, The phrase “In God we trust” legally became the national motto of the United States.

In 1965, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed amendments to the Social Securities Act (1935) that established Medicare and Medicaid.

In 1971, Apollo 15 astronauts David R. Scott and James B. Irwin landed on the moon.

In 1974, Under coercion from the U.S. Supreme Court, President Richard M. Nixon releases subpoenaed White House recordings—suspected to prove his guilt in the Watergate scandal—to special prosecutor Leon Jaworski.

In 1975, Former Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa disappeared in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, under mysterious circumstances.