Today in History July 21st

Today in 1861, the first battle of bull run took place. Bull run was the first major land battle of the Civil War.

On this day in 1944, Adolf Hitler takes to the airwaves to announce that the attempt on his life had failed and that “accounts will be settled.”

In 2007, the seventh and final Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is released, with an initial print run of 12 million copies in the United States alone. Like each of the previous Harry Potter novels, Deathly Hallows was already slated to be made into a major Hollywood film.

Lastly, on this day in 2011, NASA’s space shuttle program completes its final, and 135th, mission, when the shuttle Atlantis lands at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. During the program’s 30-year history, its five orbiters—Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour—carried more than 350 people into space and flew more than 500 million miles, and shuttle crews conducted important research, serviced the Hubble Space Telescope and helped in the construction of the International Space Station, among other activities.

Souce:
History.com