July 24 in History

Brigham Young rose from a sickbed in the back of a covered wagon, surveyed a desolate valley of sagebrush and salt flats ringed by mountains, and reportedly declared: "This is the right place." After a 1,300-mile journey from Nauvoo, Illinois, the first Mormon pioneers had reached the place where they would build a city, a temple, and one of the most distinctive religious communities in the Western Hemisphere. The migration was born from violence. Joseph Smith, the founding prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, had been murdered by a mob in Carthage, Illinois, in June 1844. Anti-Mormon hostility in the Midwest had been escalating for years, fueled by the church's communal economics, bloc voting, and the practice of plural marriage. Young, who assumed leadership after a bitter succession struggle, concluded that the Saints would never be safe among their neighbors and began planning an exodus to territory so remote that no one would follow. The advance company of 148 pioneers, including three enslaved Black men, left Winter Quarters near present-day Omaha in April 1847 and followed the north bank of the Platte River to avoid conflict with emigrants on the Oregon Trail. Young chose the Salt Lake Valley partly because it was technically Mexican territory, beyond the jurisdiction of the United States government, and partly because its harsh environment discouraged casual settlement. Within days of arrival, the pioneers dammed City Creek, diverted irrigation ditches, and planted crops in soil that had never been cultivated. Young laid out a grid of wide streets centered on the future site of the Salt Lake Temple, which would take forty years to build. Over the next two decades, roughly seventy thousand Mormon converts migrated to Utah by wagon, handcart, and eventually railroad. The Mexican-American War, concluded just months later, transferred Utah to American control, and the isolation Young sought proved temporary.

Tennessee became the first former Confederate state to rejoin the Union, clearing the way just fifteen months after Appomattox for a process of reconstruction that would consume the next decade and leave scars lasting far longer. Congress voted to restore Tennessee's representation after the state ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, becoming the only seceded state to avoid the military governance imposed on the other ten. Tennessee's path back was smoother than its neighbors' because of Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee Unionist who had served as military governor of the state before becoming Lincoln's vice president and then, after the assassination, president. Johnson's loyalist government in Nashville had maintained a functioning civil administration throughout the war, giving Tennessee institutional continuity that states under full Confederate control lacked. Governor William "Parson" Brownlow, a fiery Unionist preacher who had been imprisoned by the Confederacy, pushed ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment through the state legislature by questionable means, including arresting two opposing legislators to prevent them from leaving and denying a quorum. The amendment's core provisions guaranteed citizenship and equal protection under the law to all persons born in the United States, directly overturning the Dred Scott decision and establishing the constitutional basis for civil rights enforcement. The political compromise that readmitted Tennessee left the fundamental questions of Reconstruction unresolved. Freedmen technically gained citizenship but faced immediate efforts to restrict their movement, labor, and voting rights through Black Codes that mimicked slavery in all but name. The Ku Klux Klan, founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, just months earlier, was already terrorizing Black communities and white Republicans across the state. Tennessee's early readmission spared it from federal military oversight, which paradoxically may have left its Black citizens less protected than those in states where the army enforced civil rights directly.

A local farmer charged fifty cents to guide the Yale lecturer up a steep jungle trail to a set of ruins that no Western academic knew existed. Hiram Bingham III reached the stone terraces of Machu Picchu on a foggy morning, scrambling through dense vegetation to find an elaborate complex of temples, plazas, and agricultural terraces perched on a narrow ridge between two Andean peaks at nearly eight thousand feet. Bingham was searching for Vilcabamba, the legendary last capital of the Inca resistance against Spanish conquest. He had organized a Yale expedition to Peru with funding from the university and the National Geographic Society, traveling by mule through the Urubamba Valley while interviewing local residents about ruins in the mountains. Melchor Arteaga, a farmer living near the Urubamba River, mentioned the site almost in passing, and Bingham initially had low expectations for what he would find. What he discovered was not Vilcabamba but something arguably more remarkable: a fifteenth-century royal estate built by the Inca emperor Pachacuti around 1450. The complex contained roughly two hundred structures, including a precisely carved temple of the sun, an astronomical observatory, and an elaborate system of fountains and channels that carried water from a natural spring through the entire settlement. The stonework was extraordinary, with blocks fitted so tightly that no mortar was needed and a knife blade could not be inserted between them. Machu Picchu had never been "lost" to local Quechua farmers, several of whom were actively cultivating its terraces when Bingham arrived. But it was unknown to the international archaeological community, and Bingham's photographs, published by National Geographic in 1913, introduced the site to the world. He returned twice with larger expeditions, removing thousands of artifacts that became the subject of a century-long repatriation dispute between Yale and Peru. Machu Picchu now draws more than a million visitors annually, making it both Peru's greatest cultural treasure and its most pressing conservation challenge.

Temperatures hit 109 degrees Fahrenheit in parts of the Midwest while crops across the Great Plains were already dead from three years of drought, and the combined catastrophe killed an estimated 3,500 Americans in a single week. The heat wave of July 1935 struck a population that had no air conditioning, no public cooling centers, and no warning system capable of alerting vulnerable people before the worst temperatures arrived. The Dust Bowl had been devastating Plains agriculture since 1932, when severe drought combined with decades of destructive farming practices to strip the topsoil from millions of acres across Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and neighboring states. Massive dust storms, some carrying 300,000 tons of soil, had already displaced hundreds of thousands of families. The heat wave compounded the disaster, killing livestock that had survived the drought and destroying whatever crops remained. Chicago suffered particularly badly. Temperatures stayed above 100 degrees for multiple consecutive days, and overnight lows barely dropped below 80, giving residents no relief. Hospitals overflowed with heat stroke victims. Families dragged mattresses onto fire escapes and rooftops to sleep, and thousands camped along the Lake Michigan shoreline. The city morgue ran out of space, and authorities commandeered warehouses to hold the dead. The toll across the city exceeded 700 in a single week. Congress responded with emergency relief appropriations, and the Roosevelt administration accelerated programs through the Soil Conservation Service to teach farmers erosion-prevention techniques including contour plowing, terracing, and crop rotation. The Civilian Conservation Corps planted shelter belts of trees across the Plains to break the wind. These measures, combined with the return of rain in the late 1930s, gradually stabilized the region. The 1935 heat wave remains one of the deadliest weather events in American history, though it is largely forgotten beside the more photogenic dust storms.

Eight justices, zero dissents, and a presidency that had sixteen days left to live. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that Richard Nixon must surrender sixty-four White House tape recordings subpoenaed by Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski, rejecting the president's claim that executive privilege placed him above the reach of criminal investigation. Chief Justice Warren Burger, a Nixon appointee, wrote the opinion himself. Nixon had installed a secret recording system in the Oval Office in 1971, taping thousands of hours of conversations without the knowledge of most visitors. The existence of the system became public in July 1973 when White House aide Alexander Butterfield casually mentioned it during Senate Watergate Committee testimony. From that moment forward, the tapes became the central battleground of the Watergate investigation, with Nixon fighting to keep them confidential and prosecutors arguing they contained evidence of criminal conspiracy. The Court acknowledged that executive privilege was constitutionally grounded but held that it was not absolute, particularly when weighed against the requirements of criminal justice. The opinion carefully avoided broad declarations, focusing narrowly on the balance between presidential confidentiality and the need for evidence in a specific criminal proceeding. Nixon's lawyers had argued that only the president himself could determine what fell under executive privilege, a claim the Court rejected completely. Nixon released the tapes within days. Among them was the "smoking gun" recording from June 23, 1972, just six days after the Watergate break-in, in which Nixon personally directed the CIA to obstruct the FBI's investigation. The recording destroyed what remained of his support in Congress. Republican leaders visited the White House to tell him he faced certain impeachment and conviction. Nixon announced his resignation on August 8, 1974, the only American president ever to leave office voluntarily.