1913: Gerald R. Ford was born in Omaha, Nebraska. Ford became president on August 9, 1974 when Richard Nixon resigned due to the Watergate scandal. Ford was born Leslie King but changed his name in 1935 to that of his stepfather - Gerald R. Ford.

1860: Novelist Owen Wister was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania. His 1902 novel The Virginian helped create the myth of the American cowboy. Reared and educated on the east coast, Wister first visited the West in 1885. Set in Medicine Bow, Wyoming, The Virginian's tender romance between a refined Eastern schoolteacher and a rough-and-tumble cowhand, with its climactic pistol gunfight, introduced themes now standard to the American Western. (Source: Library of Congress)

1789: Bastille Day commemorates the fall of the Bastille, a French prison, at the beginning of the French Revolution.