Today in history: July 2

1776: The American Contintental Congress adopts a resolution cutting ties with Great Britain, although a formal Declaration of Independence will come two days later.

1778: Philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau dies at Ermenonville, France.

1819: The British Parliament passes the first Factory Act, which prohibits children under nine from working in factories, and limits hours of children 9-16 to 72 hours a week.

1839: Fifty-three captured Africans being carried aboard the Spanish ship Amistad escape and take over the ship.

1881: U.S. President James Abram Garfield is assassinated by a failed lawyer who had hoped for a job from the new administration.

1890: Congress passes the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.

1908: Future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall is born at Baltimore, Maryland.

1932: Wendy’s Hamburgers entrepreneur R. David “Dave” Thomas is born at Atlantic City, New Jersey.  Six weeks later he’ll be adopted by a family in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

1947: An spacecraft crashes at Roswell, New Mexico, carrying the bodies of four aliens.  The government insists that the crash was nothing but a weather balloon, but is unable to explain how four aliens came to be riding in a weather balloon.

1961: Writer Ernest Hemingway blows his head off with a double-barrelled 12-gauge English shotgun bought from Abercrombie & Fitch.  He leaves his estate in Cuba to Fidel Castro.

1964: President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act into law.

1982: Larry Walters of Los Angeles, California, ties 45 four-foot helium-filled weather balloons to his lawnchair and sails 16,000 feet into the air over Long Beach, California, equipped with a parachute, a pellet gun, a CB radio, and some soft drinks and sandwiches.