Liberty Bell rang out July 8, 1776

• On July 8, 1776, in Philadelphia, the Liberty Bell rings out from the tower of the Pennsylvania State House (now known as Independence Hall), summoning citizens to the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence. Although the Declaration of Independence was adopted on July 4, the Liberty Bell was not rung until it returned from the printer on July 8.

• On July 4, 1855, Walt Whitman’s first edition of the self-published “Leaves of Grass” is printed, containing a dozen poems. Whitman revised the book many times, constantly adding and rewriting poems until shortly before his death in 1892.

• On July 5, 1950, Pvt. Kenneth Shadrick, a 19-year-old infantryman from Skin Fork, W.Va., becomes the first American reported killed in the Korean War when he is felled by enemy machine-gun fire near Sojong, South Korea.

• On July 10, 1965, the Rolling Stones single “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” climbs to No. 1 on the Billboard charts. It was the British band’s first No. 1 hit in the United States.

• On July 7, 1976, women are enrolled into the United States Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., for the first time in history. On May 28, 1980, 62 of those female cadets graduated and were commissioned as second lieutenants.

• On July 6, 1981, chemical giant Dupont announced plans to merge with Houston-based oil and energy titan Conoco Inc. Valued at between $6.5 and $7 billion, the deal then stood as the single biggest merger in U.S. corporate history.

• On July 9, 1993, British forensic scientists announce that they have positively identified the remains of Russia’s last czar, Nicholas II, his wife and three of their daughters using bones excavated from a mass grave. On July 16, 1918, three centuries of the Romanov dynasty came to an end when Bolshevik troops executed Nicholas and his family.