A Note From Bob

Friday, and the last day of the month. Most mornings we spend this space on one person or one war. Today is different. Look back over the thirty-one days just behind us, not in 2026 but across the whole record, and July turns out to be one of the busiest stretches on the calendar. A congress in Philadelphia votes itself out of an empire. A crowd in Paris tears down a prison. Cavalry holds a ridge outside a Pennsylvania college town. A Saturn V clears the tower on the Florida coast. The guns in Korea finally stop. A hundred women and men sign their names at Seneca Falls. Fifteen questions today on the month itself, spanning roughly two thousand years and five continents. Last quiz of July. Pour the coffee.

Trivia Question of the Day

The answer is at the bottom of this email.

Today's Featured Quiz

Mussolini voted out by his own Grand Council. Pasteur gambling on a nine-year-old boy bitten by a rabid dog. A young lawyer named Castro attacking an army barracks in Santiago de Cuba. A French resistance leader dying in German custody and becoming a national saint. The last Tsar and his family in a cellar in Yekaterinburg. Hawaii annexed by a stroke of William McKinley's pen. A Teamsters boss walking out of a restaurant in suburban Detroit and never being seen again. All of it inside the same thirty-one days, spread across roughly two thousand years. 15 questions.

The Answer

On July 2, 1776, Congress voted on Richard Henry Lee's resolution and the thirteen colonies declared themselves independent states. Twelve voted yes, New York abstained, and the decision was done. Adams wrote to Abigail the next morning that the Second of July would be "celebrated by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival," with guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of the continent to the other. Two days later Congress approved the wording of the document that explained the vote, and the Fourth is the date that got printed at the top of it. Most delegates did not sign the engrossed copy until August 2. So Adams was right about the parades and wrong about the day, which is a very Adams thing to be. He died on the Fourth of July, 1826, a few hours after Jefferson, fifty years to the day after the date he thought no one would remember.

On This Day

The month has one more entry in it. On July 31, 1777, Congress commissioned a nineteen-year-old French volunteer as a major general in the Continental Army. He had arrived without a command, without orders from his king, and without much English, and he would spend the next four years becoming the closest thing George Washington had to a son. The Marquis de Lafayette got that commission on the last day of July, twelve years before a crowd in his own country tore down a prison on the fourteenth of the same month. The prison is question two.