On July 28, 1996, two men happened upon a skull in a Washington state park, which was part of a skeleton eventually discovered to be more than 9,000 years old. The remains, christened Kennewick Man, were reinterred 21 years later in a Native American ceremony.
* On July 29, 1862, Confederate spy Maria Isabella “Belle” Boyd was arrested by Union troops and held at the Old Capitol Prison in Washington, D.C. It was the first of three arrests for the intrepid teenager, who was 17 when she shot and killed a Union solider for insulting her mother and threatening to search their house. Four years later, she turned her experiences into a book and acting career.
* On July 30, 2004, the cult-classic “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle,” starring John Cho and Kal Penn as two burgercraving stoners, debuted. Reportedly, the White Castle chain noted a 30% rise in sales the following week.
* On July 31, 1556, Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order of Roman Catholic missionaries and educators formally known as The Society of Jesus, died in Rome. He was canonized as a Catholic saint in 1622.
* On Aug. 1, 1944, Anne Frank, the young Jewish girl hiding in a secret annex in Nazi-occupied Holland whose diary would come to serve as a powerful symbol of the Holocaust, penned her final entry three days before she, her family and four others were arrested and transported to concentration camps.
* On Aug. 2, 1939, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt with the suggestion that uranium could be used in the creation of “extremely powerful bombs of a new type.” Years later, however, he would describe the missive as the “one great mistake” of his life.
* On Aug. 3, 1936, trackand- field star Jesse Owens earned the first of four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics, the most of any American at the Games. Sadly, back in the States, only white Olympians were invited to the White House.
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