Historical Events on this Day in History - per Wikipedia

August 7

• 322 BC – Battle of Crannon between Athens and Macedon.
• 461 – Roman Emperor Majorian is beheaded near the river Iria in north-west Italy.
• 626 – The Avar and Slav armies leave the siege of Constantinople.
• 936 – Coronation of King Otto I of Germany.
• 1420 – Construction of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore begins in Florence.
• 1427 – The Visconti of Milan's fleet is destroyed by the Venetians on the Po River.
• 1461 – The Ming Dynasty Chinese military general Cao Qin stages a coup against the Tianshun Emperor.
• 1679 – The brigantine Le Griffon, commissioned by René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, is towed to the south-eastern end of the Niagara River, to become the first ship to sail the upper Great Lakes of North America.
• 1714 – The Battle of Gangut: the first important victory of the Russian Navy.
• 1782 – George Washington orders the creation of the Badge of Military Merit to honor soldiers wounded in battle. It is later renamed to the more poetic Purple Heart.
• 1789 – The United States War Department is established.
• 1791 – United States troops destroy the Miami town of Kenapacomaqua near the site of present-day Logansport, Indiana in the Northwest Indian War.
• 1794 – U.S. President George Washington invokes the Militia Law of 1792 to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania.
• 1819 – Simón Bolívar triumphs over Spain in the Battle of Boyacá.
• 1879 – The opening of the Poor Man's Palace in Manchester.
• 1890 – Anna Månsdotter becomes the last woman in Sweden to be executed, for the 1889 Yngsjö murder.
• 1909 – Alice Huyler Ramsey and three friends become the first women to complete a transcontinental auto trip, taking 59 days to travel from New York City to San Francisco.
• 1927 – The Peace Bridge opens between Fort Erie, Ontario and Buffalo, New York.
• 1930 – The last confirmed lynching of blacks in the Northern United States occurs in Marion, Indiana. Two men, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, are killed.
• 1933 – The Simele massacre: The Iraqi Government slaughters over 3,000 Assyrians in the village of Sumail. The day becomes known as Assyrian Martyrs Day.
• 1940 – World War II: Alsace Lorraine is annexed by the Third Reich.
• 1942 – World War II: the Battle of Guadalcanal begins – United States Marines initiate the first American offensive of the war with landings on Guadalcanal and Tulagi in the Solomon Islands.
• 1944 – IBM dedicates the first program-controlled calculator, the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (known best as the Harvard Mark I).
• 1947 – Thor Heyerdahl's balsa wood raft the Kon-Tiki, smashes into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands after a 101-day, 7,000 kilometres (4,300 mi) journey across the Pacific Ocean in an attempt to prove that pre-historic peoples could have traveled from South America.
• 1947 – The Bombay Municipal Corporation formally takes over the Bombay Electric Supply and Transport (BEST).
• 1955 – Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering, the precursor to Sony, sells its first transistor radios in Japan.
• 1959 – The Lincoln Memorial design on the U.S. penny goes into circulation. It replaces the "sheaves of wheat" design, and was minted until 2008.
• 1959 – Explorer program: Explorer 6 launches from the Atlantic Missile Range in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
• 1960 – Côte d'Ivoire becomes independent.
• 1964 – Vietnam War: the U.S. Congress passes the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving US President Lyndon B. Johnson broad war powers to deal with North Vietnamese attacks on American forces.
• 1964 – Prometheus, a bristlecone pine and the world's oldest tree, is cut down.
• 1965 – The infamous first party between Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and motorcycle gang the Hells Angels takes place at Kesey's estate in La Honda, California introducing psychedelics to the gang world and forever linking the hippie movement to the Hell's Angels.
• 1966 – Race riots occur in Lansing, Michigan.
• 1967 – Vietnam War: the People's Republic of China agrees to give North Vietnam an undisclosed amount of aid in the form of a grant.
• 1970 – California judge Harold Haley is taken hostage in his courtroom and killed during in an effort to free George Jackson from police custody.
• 1974 – Philippe Petit performs a high wire act between the twin towers of the World Trade Center 1,368 feet (417 m) in the air.
• 1976 – Viking program: Viking 2 enters orbit around Mars.
• 1978 – U.S. President Jimmy Carter declares a federal emergency at Love Canal.^[why?]
• 1979 – Several tornadoes struck the city of Woodstock, Ontario, Canada and the surrounding communities.
• 1981 – The Washington Star ceases all operations after 128 years of publication.
• 1985 – Takao Doi, Mamoru Mohri and Chiaki Mukai are chosen to be Japan's first astronauts.
• 1988 – Rioting in New York City's Tompkins Square Park.
• 1989 – U.S. Congressman Mickey Leland (D-TX) and 15 others die in a plane crash in Ethiopia.
• 1998 – The United States embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya kill approximately 212 people.
• 2007 – Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants breaks* baseball great Hank Aaron's record by hitting his 756th home run.
• 2008 – Georgia launches a military offensive against South Ossetia to counter the alleged Russian invasion, starting the South Ossetia War.