1935 – The world's first parking meter is installed in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

1945 – Manhattan Project: The Atomic Age begins when the United States successfully detonates a plutonium-based test nuclear weapon near Alamogordo, New Mexico.

1951 – J. D. Salinger publishes his popular yet controversial novel, The Catcher in the Rye.

1799 – The Rosetta Stone is found in the Egyptian village of Rosetta by French Captain Pierre-François Bouchard during Napoleon's Egyptian Campaign.

1834 – The Spanish Inquisition is officially disbanded after nearly 356 years.

1838 – Ralph Waldo Emerson delivers the Divinity School Address at Harvard Divinity School, discounting Biblical miracles and declaring Jesus a great man, but not God. The Protestant community reacts with outrage.

1942 – The Holocaust: Nazi Germany begins the deportation of 100,000 Jews from the occupied Netherlands to extermination camps.

 mannixj wrote:

It was also considered settled science back then as well.

 kurtster wrote:

Exactly. DNA was discovered only 40 years later (Watson's & Crick's double helix).  Instead, many scientists were measuring skull forms in search for patterns matching with burglars, murderers, etc. - "Human Races" and their peculiarities were comparatively studied and that "knowledge" was considered modern science.

 Red_Dragon wrote:

Directly patterned after the American Progressive (Bull Moose) Party's ideals. T Roosevelt was a major advocate.



Context and Ideology

• The Progressive View: In the early 20th century, many reformers viewed eugenics not as a tool for hatred, but as a progressive, scientific method for improving public health, reducing poverty, and "uplifting" the human race. 

1789 – Storming of the Bastille in Paris. This event escalates the widespread discontent into the French Revolution. Bastille Day is still celebrated annually in France.

1798 – The Sedition Act of 1798 becomes law in the United States making it a federal crime to write, publish, or utter false or malicious statements about the United States government.

1933 – In a decree called the Gleichschaltung, Adolf Hitler abolishes all German political parties except the Nazis.

1933 – Nazi eugenics programme begins with the proclamation of the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring requiring the compulsory sterilization of any citizen who suffers from alleged genetic disorders.

1957 – Rawya Ateya takes her seat in the National Assembly of Egypt, thereby becoming the first female parliamentarian in the Arab world.

1960 – Jane Goodall arrives at the Gombe Stream Reserve in present-day Tanzania to begin her study of chimpanzees in the wild.

1965 – Mariner 4 flyby of Mars takes the first close-up photos of another planet. The photographs take approximately six hours to be transmitted back to Earth.

2015 – NASA's New Horizons probe performs the first flyby of Pluto, and thus completes the initial survey of the Solar System.

Two years ago today was the first of a string of staged fake assassination attempts on Trump.

1956 – The Dartmouth workshop is the first conference on artificial intelligence.

1789 – In response to the dismissal of the French finance minister Jacques Necker, the radical journalist Camille Desmoulins gives a speech which results in the storming of the Bastille two days later.

1948 – Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion orders the expulsion of Palestinians from the towns of Lod and Ramala.

1973 – A fire destroys the entire sixth floor of the National Personnel Records Center of the United States.

1801 – French astronomer Jean-Louis Pons makes his first comet discovery. In the next 27 years he discovers another 36 comets, more than any other person in history.

1914 – Babe Ruth makes his debut in Major League Baseball.

1921 – Former president of the United States William Howard Taft is sworn in as 10th chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, becoming the only person ever to hold both offices.

1922 – The Hollywood Bowl opens.

1947 – The Exodus 1947 heads to Palestine from France.

1960 – To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is first published, in the United States.

1962 – First transatlantic satellite television transmission.

1962 – Project Apollo: At a press conference, NASA announces lunar orbit rendezvous as the means to land astronauts on the Moon, and return them to Earth.

1977 – Martin Luther King Jr., assassinated in 1968, is posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

1979 – America's first space station, Skylab, is destroyed as it re-enters the Earth's atmosphere over the Indian Ocean.

1890 – Wyoming is admitted as the 44th U.S. state.

1925 – Scopes trial: In Dayton, Tennessee, the so-called "Monkey Trial" begins of John T. Scopes, a young high school science teacher accused of teaching evolution in violation of the Butler Act.

1962 – Telstar, the world's first communications satellite, is launched into orbit.

1985 – The Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior is bombed and sunk in Auckland harbour by French DGSE agents, killing Fernando Pereira.

1997 – In London, scientists report the findings of the DNA analysis of a Neanderthal skeleton which supports the "out of Africa theory" of human evolution, placing an "African Eve" at 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.

1998 – Catholic Church sexual abuse cases: The Diocese of Dallas agrees to pay $23.4 million to nine former altar boys who claim they were sexually abused by Rudolph Kos, a former priest.

2012 – The Episcopal Church USA allows same-sex marriage.

2019 – The final Volkswagen Beetle rolls off the line in Puebla, Mexico; the last of 5,961 "Special Edition" cars will be exhibited in a museum.

1868 – The 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution is ratified, guaranteeing African Americans full citizenship and all persons in the United States due process of law.

1962 – Starfish Prime tests the effects of a nuclear explosion at orbital altitudes.

1986 – The New Zealand Parliament passes the Homosexual Law Reform Act legalizing homosexuality in New Zealand.

1775 – The Olive Branch Petition is signed by the Continental Congress of the Thirteen Colonies of North America.

1776 – John Nixon delivers the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence of the United States.

1889 – The first issue of The Wall Street Journal is published.

1947 – Reports are broadcast that a UFO crash-landed in Roswell, New Mexico in what became known as the Roswell UFO incident.

1911 – The United States, UK, Japan, and Russia sign the North Pacific Fur Seal Convention of 1911 banning open-water seal hunting, the first international treaty to address wildlife preservation issues.

1928 – Sliced bread is sold for the first time (on the inventor's 48th birthday) by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri.

1937 – The Peel Commission Report recommends the partition of Palestine, which was the first formal recommendation for partition in the history of Palestine.

1992 – The New York Court of Appeals rules that women have the same right as men to go topless in public.

2017 – The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons was adopted with 122 countries voting in favour.

1933 – The first Major League Baseball All-Star Game is played in Chicago's Comiskey Park. The American League defeated the National League 4–2.

1939 – Anti-Jewish legislation in prewar Nazi Germany closes the last remaining Jewish enterprises.

1942 – Anne Frank and her family go into hiding in the "Secret Annexe" above her father's office in an Amsterdam warehouse.

1944 – Jackie Robinson refuses to move to the back of a bus, leading to his court-martial.

1957 – John Lennon and Paul McCartney meet for the first time, as teenagers at Woolton Fete, three years before forming the Beatles.

2003 – The 70-metre Yevpatoria Planetary Radar sends a METI message (Cosmic Call 2) to five stars: Hip 4872, HD 245409, 55 Cancri (HD 75732), HD 10307 and 47 Ursae Majoris (HD 95128). The messages will arrive to these stars in 2036, 2040, 2044, and 2049, respectively.

1852 – Abolitionist Frederick Douglass delivers his "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" speech at a meeting organized by the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society in Rochester, New York.

1935 – The National Labor Relations Act, which governs labor relations in the United States, is signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

1948 – National Health Service Acts create the national public health system in the United Kingdom.

1954 – The BBC broadcasts its first daily television news bulletin.

1954 – Elvis Presley records his first single, "That's All Right", at Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee.

1971 – The Twenty-sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution, lowering the voting age from 21 to 18 years, is formally certified by President Richard Nixon.

1994 – Jeff Bezos founds Amazon.

1996 – Dolly the sheep becomes the first mammal cloned from an adult cell.

2016 – The Juno space probe arrives at Jupiter and begins a 20-month survey of the planet.

1054 – A supernova, called SN 1054, is seen by Chinese Song dynasty, Arab, and possibly Amerindian observers near the star Zeta Tauri. For several months it remains bright enough to be seen during the day. Its remnants form the Crab Nebula.

1776 – American Revolution: The United States Declaration of Independence is adopted by the Second Continental Congress, formally announcing and explaining separation from the Kingdom of Great Britain and the creation of the United States.

1845 – Henry David Thoreau moves into a small cabin on Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. Thoreau's account of his two years there, Walden, will become a touchstone of the environmental movement.

1855 – The first edition of Walt Whitman's book of poems, Leaves of Grass, is published in Brooklyn.

1881 – In Alabama, the Tuskegee Institute opens.

1951 – William Shockley announces the invention of the junction transistor.

1966 – U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Freedom of Information Act into United States law. The act went into effect the next year.

1997 – NASA's Pathfinder space probe lands on the surface of Mars.

2012 – The discovery of particles consistent with the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider is announced at CERN.

1886 – Karl Benz officially unveils the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, the first purpose-built automobile.

1973 – David Bowie retires his stage persona Ziggy Stardust with the surprise announcement that it is "the last show that we'll ever do" on the last day of the Ziggy Stardust Tour.