July 11 is:
Cheer up the Lonely Day
World Population Day
Slurpee Day
National Blueberry Muffin Day
National Mojito Day – mojito is a cocktail that consists of five ingredients: white rum, sugar (traditionally sugar cane juice), lime juice, sparkling water, and mint.
England’s King Henry VIII was excommunicated on this date in 1533.
Martin Frobisher sighted Greenland in 1576.
John Quincy Adams , the sixth president of the United States, was born in Braintree, Mass on July 11, 1767.
The United States Marine Corps was re-established by an Act of Congress in 1798; it had been disbanded after the American Revolutionary War.
Vice-President Aaron Burr mortally wounded former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in a pistol duel near Weehawken, N.J. on July 11, 1804. See Burr-Hamilton Duel
Waterloo railway station in London opened in 1848.
Big Ben, the great bell inside the famous London clock tower, chimed for the first time on July 11, 1859.
1893 – The first cultured pearl was obtained by Kokichi Mikimoto.
On July 11, 1899, E. B. White, the American writer of essays and children’s books, was born. His classic children’s books, “Stuart Little”, “Charlotte’s Web” and “The Trumpet of the Swan” continue to sell in the hundreds of thousands every year.
1921 – Former President of the United States William Howard Taft was sworn in as 10th Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, becoming the only person ever to hold both offices. To Taft, the appointment to the Supreme Court was his greatest honor; he wrote: “I don’t remember that I ever was President.”
July 11, 1944, Franklin Roosevelt announced that he would run for a fourth term as President of the United States.
Anniversary of the dedication of the U.S. Air Force Academy in Lowry Air Base, Colorado in 1955.
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee was first published in 1960.
July 11,2007, former first lady Lady Bird Johnson, wife of Lyndon B. Johnson, died in Austin, Texas, at age 94.
Astronomers announce the discovery of Styx, the fifth moon of Pluto. in 2012.
From Today in Science:
In 1997, the first sequencing of pieces of DNA extracted from a Neanderthal-type specimen was published in the journal Cell, by a team of scientists led by Svent Pääbo. In the groundbreaking study, mitochondrial DNA was amplified from a sample (a small piece of the arm bone) from the first Neanderthal man found (1856). “The Neanderthal sequence falls outside the variation of modern humans.” The results suggested that from their common origin (“African Eve”), Neanderthals split off from humans a little over 550,000 years ago as a separate species and “went extinct without contributing mtDNA to modern humans.” (Using population models, Pääbo, more recently estimated that Neanderthals could have contributed up to 25% of their genetic makeup to modern human, but likely much less.)