QUARANTINE BLOG # 487

July 30, 2021

Enjoy our monthly look back at this day in history feature.

The Sony Walkman went on sale for the very first time on July 1, 1979.  The Walkman didn’t represent a breakthrough in technology so much as it did a breakthrough in imagination.  Sony’s chairman, Masaru Ibuka, was a music lover who traveled frequently and had no convenient way to listen to his music on long distance flights.  After pitching the idea to his R&D department, the first Walkman was available four months later, and the first run sold out in two months.

On July 2, 1977, Hollywood composer Bill Conti scored a #1 pop hit with the single “Gonna Fly Now.”  Conti was a relative unknown in Hollywood when he began work on the theme from Rocky, but so was Sylvester Stallone.  In the years since the release of Rocky, Sylvester Stallone has continued to churn out action flicks, and Bill Conti has built a hugely successful career as a composer for film and television – a career that eventually included an Academy Award for Best Original Score for the 1983 film The Right Stuff.

On the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg, Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s last attempt at breaking the Union line ended in disastrous failure, bringing the most decisive battle of the American Civil War to an end.  Both armies, exhausted, held their positions until the night of July 4, when Lee withdrew.  The Army of the Potomac was too weak to pursue the Confederates, and Lee led his army out of the North, never to invade it again.  The Battle of Gettysburg was the turning point in the Civil War, costing the Union 23,000 killed, wounded, or missing in action. The Confederates suffered some 25,000 casualties.

In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on July 4, 1776, the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed the independence of the United States of America from Great Britain and its king.  The declaration came 442 days after the first volleys of the American Revolution were fired at Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts and marked an ideological expansion of the conflict that would eventually encourage France’s intervention on behalf of the Patriots.

On July 5, 1946, French designer Louis Réard unveiled a daring two-piece swimsuit at the Piscine Molitor, a popular swimming pool in Paris. Parisian showgirl Micheline Bernardini modeled the new fashion, which Réard dubbed “bikini,” inspired by a news-making U.S. atomic test that took place off the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean earlier that week.

On July 6, 1933, Major League Baseball’s first All-Star Game took place at Chicago’s Comiskey Park.  The event was designed to bolster the sport and improve its reputation during the darkest years of the Great Depression.  Originally billed as a one-time “Game of the Century,” it has now become a permanent fixture of the baseball season.

Amy Elizabeth Sisler, now Amy Herrington was born on July 7, 1974, in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.  Her mom and dad were pastoring the Windber Church of God at the time, and Jennifer Darlyn Sisler gave up the title of “only child” that day.

On July 9, 1877, the All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club began its first lawn tennis tournament at Wimbledon, then an outer-suburb of London.  Twenty-one amateurs showed up to compete in the Gentlemen’s Singles tournament, the only event at the first Wimbledon. The winner was to take home a trophy which cost 25-guinea ($34.22 today).  The club was originally founded to promote croquet, another lawn sport, but the growing popularity of tennis led it to incorporate tennis lawns into its facilities.

In Dayton, Tennessee, the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial began on July 10, 1925,  with John Thomas Scopes, a young high school science teacher, accused of teaching evolution in violation of a Tennessee state law.  Hearing of this attack on Christian fundamentalism, William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic presidential candidate and a fundamentalist hero, volunteered to assist the prosecution.  Soon after, the great attorney Clarence Darrow agreed to join the ACLU in the defense, and the stage was set for one of the most famous trials in U.S. history.  Scopes was found guilty.

On July 11, 1804, in one of the most famous duels in American history, Vice President Aaron Burr fatally shot his long-time political antagonist Alexander Hamilton.  Hamilton died the following day.  According to Hamilton’s “second” – his assistant and witness in the duel – Hamilton decided the duel was morally wrong and deliberately fired into the air.  Burr fired, shot Hamilton in the stomach, and the bullet lodged next to his spine.  Hamilton was taken back to New York, and he died the next afternoon.  Burr, serving as Thomas Jefferson’s vice president, returned to Washington, D.C., where he finished his term immune from prosecution.

Parisian revolutionaries and mutinous troops stormed and dismantled the Bastille, a royal fortress and prison that had come to symbolize the tyranny of the Bourbon monarchs on July 14, 1789.  This dramatic action signaled the beginning of the French Revolution, a decade of political turmoil and terror in which King Louis XVI was overthrown and tens of thousands of people, including the king and his wife Marie Antoinette, were executed.

On July 16, 1945, at 5:29:45 a.m., the Manhattan Project yielded explosive results as the first atom bomb was successfully tested in Alamogordo, New Mexico.  The scientists and a few dignitaries had removed themselves 10,000 yards away to observe as the first mushroom cloud of searing light stretched 40,000 feet into the air and generated the destructive power of 15,000 to 20,000 tons of TNT.  The tower on which the bomb sat when detonated was vaporized.  The question now became on whom was the bomb to be dropped?  Germany was the original target, but the Germans had already surrendered.  The only belligerent remaining was Japan.

Disneyland, Walt Disney’s metropolis of nostalgia, fantasy and futurism, opened on July 17, 1955.  The $17 million theme park was built on 160 acres of former orange groves in Anaheim, California, and soon brought in staggering profits.  Today, Disneyland hosts more than 18 million visitors a year, who spend close to $3 billion.

On July 19, 1799, during Napoleon Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign, a French soldier discovered a black basalt slab inscribed with ancient writing near the town of Rosetta, about 35 miles east of Alexandria.  The irregularly shaped stone contained fragments of passages written in three different scripts: Greek, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Egyptian demotic.  The ancient Greek on the Rosetta Stone announced that the three scripts were all of identical meaning.  The artifact thus held the key to solving the riddle of hieroglyphics, a written language that had been “dead” for nearly 2,000 years.

At 10:56 p.m. EDT, American astronaut Neil Armstrong, 240,000 miles from Earth, spoke these words to more than a billion people listening at home: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”  Stepping off the lunar landing module Eagle, Armstrong became the first human to walk on the surface of the moon.

On July 21, 2011, NASA’s space shuttle program completed its final, and 135th, mission, when the shuttle Atlantis landed at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.  During the program’s 30-year history, its five orbiters – Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour – carried more than 350 people into space and flew more than 500 million miles, and shuttle crews conducted important research, serviced the Hubble Space Telescope and helped in the construction of the International Space Station.

On July 24, 1911, American archeologist Hiram Bingham got his first look at the ruins of Machu Picchu, an ancient Inca settlement in Peru that is now one of the world’s top tourist destinations.  Tucked away in the rocky countryside northwest of Cuzco, Machu Picchu is believed to have been a summer retreat for Inca leaders, whose civilization was virtually wiped out by Spanish invaders in the 16th century.

Jack London departed for the Klondike on July 25, 1897, to join the gold rush, where he would write the first of his stories of adventure in harsh Alaska.  He dropped out of the University of California at Berkeley the 1897 gold rush.  While in the Klondike, London began submitting stories to magazines.  His story The Call of the Wild made him famous.  During his 17-year career, he wrote 50 fiction and nonfiction books. 

On July 26, 1775, the U.S. postal system was established by the Second Continental Congress, with Benjamin Franklin as its first postmaster general.  During early colonial times in the 1600s, there were no post offices in the colonies, so mail was typically left at inns and taverns.  Benjamin made numerous improvements to the mail system, including setting up new, more efficient colonial routes and cutting delivery time in half between Philadelphia and New York by having the weekly mail wagon travel both day and night via relay teams. 

On July 27, 1974, the House Judiciary Committee recommended that America’s 37th president, Richard M. Nixon, be impeached as a result of the Watergate scandals.  On August 8, Nixon announced his resignation, becoming the first president in U.S. history to voluntarily leave office.  After departing the White House on August 9, Nixon was succeeded by Vice President Gerald Ford, who, in a controversial move, pardoned Nixon on September 8, 1974, making it impossible for the former president to be prosecuted for any crimes he might have committed while in office. 

A United States B-25 bomber crashed into the Empire State Building on July 28, 1945, killing 14 people.  The freak accident was caused by heavy fog.  The bomber was flying from New Bedford, Massachusetts, to LaGuardia Airport in New York City.  Air-traffic controllers instructed the plane to fly to Newark Airport instead.  This new flight plan took the plane over Manhattan; the crew was specifically warned that the Empire State Building, the tallest building in the city at the time, was not visible.  The bomber was seeking better visibility, when it came upon the Chrysler Building in midtown.  It swerved to avoid the building but the move sent it straight into the north side of the Empire State Building, near the 79th floor.

On July 30, 1956, two years after pushing to have the phrase “under God” inserted into the pledge of allegiance, President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed a law officially declaring “In God We Trust” to be the nation’s official motto.  At a Flag Day speech, he elaborated on his feelings about the place of religion in public life when he discussed why he had wanted to include “under God” in the pledge of allegiance: “In this way we are reaffirming the transcendence of religious faith in America’s heritage and future; in this way we shall constantly strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country’s most powerful resource in peace and war.”

Eleven treasure-laden ships that made up the 1715 Fleet were heading to Spain from Havana on July 31, 1715, when they encountered a hurricane off Florida’s central coast.  The winds and waves smashed the ships onto reefs, claiming as many as 1,000 lives in one of colonial Spain’s biggest maritime disasters off Florida.  300 years later, treasure hunter William Bartlett found 350 coins worth $4.5 million, the most valuable find from the 1715 shipwreck site in recent decades.

👉  Today’s close is by Adrian Rogers

“Therefore, we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight” (Hebrews 12:1).

If you’re going to run a race, how do you prepare?  First, you lay the weights aside.  Notice athletes.  They run in very light clothing.  The less weight, the better.  One thing you’ll never see is someone in the Olympics running in an overcoat.  It’s not going to happen.  They get as light as they possibly can.  You have to lay aside every weight.

The Greek word weight doesn’t mean something sinful.  It just means something that burdens you, that holds you down.  There are some things that are not bad in themselves.  There’s nothing wrong with an overcoat.  You just don’t wear an overcoat when you’re running a race.  Paul said: “All things are lawful for me, but all things are not helpful” (1 Corinthians 6:12).

Is there something in your life that’s hindering your walk with Christ?  Something holding you back from being all you can be for the Lord Jesus Christ?  Good things become bad things when they keep you from the best things.  Whatever it is, if you want to win the race, lay it aside.

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