For today, I thought I would share some things throughout history that I found interesting that happened on July 25. Many things happened on this day in all those years passed, but these are the few that caught my interest. We begin in 1853. Joaquin Murrieta, the famous Californian bandit known as “Robin Hood of El Dorado”, is killed by California Rangers. In 1919 Johnston McCulley read “The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murrieta: The Celebrated California Bandit” by John Rollin Ridge and this inspired his fiction character Don Diego de la Vega, also known as Zorro.
In 1943, the 1st warship named after an African American launched, USS Leonard Roy Harmon, a Buckley class destroyer. Leonard Roy Harmon was an American Sailor who died during WWII and was awarded the Navy Cross for his valor. In 1972, US health officials concede African Americans were used as guinea pigs in a 40-year syphilis experiment. Given the current political climate of the United States, I felt both of these events were important as one celebrates African Americans and the other illustrates how they were still used by upper classes.
In 1984 Cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya became the first woman to walk in space. She was also the second woman to fly to space. Her spacewalk mission was aboard the Soyuz T-12. In 2019 “City killer” Asteroid 2019 OK passed by almost undetected at 187 to 427 feet (57 to 130 meters) just 45,000 miles (72,000 km) away from Earth, closer than the Moon. It was discovered the day before, July 24, 2019, it passed by Earth. It is uncommon for asteroids this size to pass within 100,000 km (62,000 miles) of Earth.
James Pack 