July 13 is:
Barbershop Music Appreciation Day
National French Fries Day
Beans ‘n’ Franks Day
1787 – The Northwest Ordinance was enacted by the Continental Congress. It established governing rules for the Northwest Territory. Also, the Congress also established procedures for the admission of new states and limited the expansion of slavery.
July 13, 1821 – Birthday of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate cavalry officer. From his obituary published in the New York Times:
…Immediately before the close of the war, the characteristic types of the soldiers of the South were sketched. It was pointed out that while Virginia, and what might be called the “old South,” produced gallant soldiers and dignified gentlemen, the South-west, the rude border country, gave birth to men of reckless ruffianism and cut-throat daring. The type of the first was Gen. Robert E. Lee; that of the latter, Gen. Bedford Forrest.
July 13, 1865 Horace Greeley advised his readers to “”Go west, young man”.
Guglielmo Marconi patented the radio in 1898.
The dedication of the Hollywood Sign on Mount Lee in the Hollywood Hills area of the Santa Monica Mountains above Hollywood, Los Angeles, California in 1923. It originally read “Hollywoodland ” but the four last letters were dropped after renovation in 1949. Afterwards, “HOLLYWOOD” was spelled out in 45-foot-tall white capital letters, and is 350 feet long. It was originally created as an advertisement for a local real estate development.
From Today in Science:
Erno Rubik was born 13 Jul 1944.
Rubik was a Hungarian mathematician, educator and inventor of the Rubik’s Cube, a popular toy of the 1980s. Rubik’s Cube consists of 26 small cubes that rotate on a central axis; nine coloured cube faces, in three rows of three each, form each side of the cube. When the cube arrangement is randomized, the player must then return it to the original condition of faces with matching colours, which is one among 43 quintillion possible configurations.