🇬🇧 On July 1st 1916, the Battle of the Somme begins. On the first day of the nearly five month long battle, the British Army lost about 20,000 men. Roughly 3 million men fought in this battle, and by the time the battle ended on November 18, a total of about a million+ men from both sides had been killed or wounded, making it one of the deadliest battles in history.
3 July 1863: Confederate General Lewis Armistead leading his men forward during Pickett's Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg, which would become known as the "High Water Mark of the Confederacy". This battle involved the largest number of casualties of the entire war.
🇬🇧 Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, 1844. He was one of the British commanders who ended the Anglo-Mysore wars by defeating Tipu Sultan in 1799 and among those who ended the Napoleonic Wars in a Coalition victory when the Seventh Coalition defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. He also served twice as Prime Minister of the UK.
🇺🇸 The delegates to the Second Continental Congress representing the 13 colonies authorize the Congress to approve the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The Declaration proclaimed the signatory colonies were now "free and independent States," and no longer colonies of the Kingdom of Great Britain.