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American history, reported as it happened
Made for the 250thOn this day › June 29
What happened on June 29 in American history
June 29 is the 180th day of the year (the 181st in leap years). Patriot Compass has published 11 stories from June 29 spanning 1620 to 2007. Among them: in 1620, Crown bans English-grown tobacco; Virginia alone may supply the kingdom; and in 1776, Barry holds off three British warships; the Nancy's powder reaches shore, then the ship goes up.
1620Member story · 1776 Club
Crown bans English-grown tobacco; Virginia alone may supply the kingdom
A royal license costs 15 pounds a year to sell it, and no leaf may enter England from any colony but Virginia.
1776Member story · 1776 Club
Barry holds off three British warships; the Nancy's powder reaches shore, then the ship goes up
Longboats ferry as many as 286 kegs of Caribbean gunpowder to safety under cannon fire before a lit fuse kills seven of the boarding party.
1889Member story · 1776 Club
Hyde Park votes itself out of existence; Chicago becomes the nation's largest city by land
85,000 residents choose annexation, lured by city water and sewers; Chicago now stretches from Pershing Road to 138th Street and east to Indiana.
1913Member story · 1776 Club
53,000 Union and Confederate veterans converge on Gettysburg, fifty years on
Wilson walks through a row of Boy Scouts to address the men in a tent pitched on the same ground where fifty thousand fell; most, it seems, have made their peace.
1927Member story · 1776 Club
Maitland and Hegenberger land in Hawaii; the Pacific is crossed for the first time
Their modified Fokker tri-motor, the Bird of Paradise, touches down at Wheeler Field after 25 hours and 50 minutes over open ocean, where three and a half degrees of drift would have meant vanishing without a trace.
1950
Gaetjens heads it in; the US beats England, 1–0, in Belo Horizonte
Borghi shuts out the sport's reigning aristocracy; the American squad includes a hearse driver, a schoolteacher, and men who trained together exactly once.
1956
Eisenhower signs the highway act; 41,000 miles of interstate and $25 billion set in motion
The president who crossed the country on rutted Army roads in 1919 authorizes the largest public works project the nation has yet attempted.
1972Member story · 1776 Club
Supreme Court halts executions; 630 death sentences vacated in a single morning
The Court rules in Furman v. Georgia that arbitrary application of capital punishment violates the Eighth Amendment, commuting every death row sentence in the country to life imprisonment.
1995Member story · 1776 Club
Atlantis locks onto Mir; two nations share the largest spacecraft in orbit
Twenty years after Apollo-Soyuz, an American shuttle docks with a Russian station for the first time since 1975, swapping crews and retrieving astronaut Norman Thagard.
2006Member story · 1776 Club
Supreme Court strikes down Guantanamo tribunals; Bush's war-court system is ruled unlawful
Stevens writes for a 5-3 majority: the commissions invented by the Pentagon in 2002 violate the military justice code and the Geneva Conventions alike.
2007
Apple's iPhone goes on sale; thousands who camped for days outside stores are first in line
Jobs unveiled the 3.5-inch touchscreen device in January as "an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator" in one, and today the wait ends at Apple and AT&T stores nationwide.
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