International On This Day - August 7, 2026

The brigantine Le Griffon becomes the first ship to sail the upper Great Lakes of North America.

George Washington orders the creation of the Badge of Military Merit to honor soldiers who are wounded in battle. The Merit is later renamed the Purple Heart.

The colonial Brotherton Indian Reservation in New Jersey became the first federal Indian Reservation is created by the U.S.

Sixty proof sheets of the Constitution of the United States are delivered to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The document was written on parchment paper and delivered for proofing and edits.

The U.S. Department of War is established. President George Washington signed the legislation after the first session of Congress was held. The department was later renamed the Department of Defense in 1949.

President George Washington invokes the Militia Acts of 1792. The Acts were established to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania.

Alice Huyler Ramsey and three friends become the first women to complete an auto trip from coast to coast in the U.S. The trip took 59 days to travel from New York, New York to San Francisco, California.

The first British Grand Prix was held at Brooklands track in Surrey, UK. The race featured nine starting cars, but only three drove cross the finish line.

The last confirmed lynching of black people in the Northern United States occurs in Marion, Indiana, when a white mob broke into jail and lynched Black teenagers Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith. A third teenager, James Cameron, narrowly survived the attack.

U.S. Marines initiate the first American offensive of WWII at Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. The offensive lasted 6 months.

IBM dedicates the first program-controlled calculator, the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. Designed by Howard Aiken, the calculator was used to run complex calculations for the U.S. Navy and the Manhattan Project.

Congress passes the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to give President Lyndon B. Johnson broad war powers to deal with North Vietnamese attacks on American forces.

Richard Nixon appoints Luis R. Bruce, a Mohawk-Oglala Sioux as the new commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Bruce was also co-founder of the National Congress of American Indians.

Philippe Petit performs a high wire act between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. Petit was suspended 1,350 feet above the ground and spent 45 minutes on a steel cable, crossing the gap eight times.

President Jimmy Carter declares a federal emergency at Love Canal in Niagara Falls, New York, after toxic waste had been disposed of negligently. It was the first time the U.S. used federal emergency funds for a man-made environmental disaster.

Takao Doi, Mamoru Mohri, and Chiaki Mukai becomes Japan's first astronauts.

Lynne Cox becomes the first person to swim from the U.S. to the Soviet Union. She swam across the Bering Strait from Little Diomede Island in Alaska to Big Diomede in the Soviet Union.

First American soldiers arrive in Saudi Arabia as part of the Gulf War in Operation Desert Shield. President George H.W. Bush ordered the Army's 82nd Airborne Division to help defend Saudi Arabia against Iraq.