On This Date In History

On July 13, 1787, Congress enacts the Northwest Ordinance, structuring settlement of the Northwest Territory and creating a policy for the addition of new states to the nation. The members of Congress knew that if their new confederation were to survive intact, it had to resolve the states’ competing claims to western territory.
In 1781, Virginia began by ceding its extensive land claims to Congress, a move that made other states more comfortable in doing the same. In 1784, Thomas Jefferson first proposed a method of incorporating these western territories into the United States. His plan effectively turned the territories into colonies of the existing states. Ten new northwestern territories would select the constitution of an existing state and then wait until its population reached 20,000 to join the confederation as a full member. Congress, however, feared that the new states, 10 in the Northwest as well as Kentucky, Tennessee and Vermont, would quickly gain enough power to outvote the old ones and never passed the measure.
Three years later, the Northwest Ordinance proposed that three to five new states be created from the Northwest Territory. Instead of adopting the legal constructs of an existing state, each territory would have an appointed governor and council. When the population reached 5,000, the residents could elect their own assembly, although the governor would retain absolute veto power. When 60,000 settlers resided in a territory, they could draft a constitution and petition for full statehood. The ordinance provided for civil liberties and public education within the new territories, but did not allow slavery. Pro-slavery Southerners were willing to go along with this because they hoped that the new states would be populated by white settlers from the South. They believed that although these Southerners would have no slaves of their own, they would not join the growing abolition movement of the North.

 

On July 13, 1943, the Battle of Kursk, involving some 6,000 tanks, two million men, and 5,000 aircraft, ends with the German offensive repulsed by the Soviets at heavy cost.
In early July, Germany and the USSR concentrated their forces near the city of Kursk in western Russia, site of a 150-mile-wide Soviet pocket that jutted 100 miles into the German lines. The German attack began on July 5, and 38 divisions, nearly half of which were armored, began moving from the south and the north. However, the Soviets had better tanks and air support than in previous battles, and in bitter fighting Soviet antitank artillery destroyed as much as 40 percent of the German armor, which included their new Mark VI Tiger tanks. After six days of warfare concentrated near Prokhorovka, south of Kursk, the German Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge called off the offensive, and by July 23 the Soviets had forced the Germans back to their original positions.
In the beginning of August, the Soviets began a major offensive around the Kursk salient, and within a few weeks the Germans were in retreat all along the eastern front.

 

 

On July 13, 1733, in the early morning, a flotilla under the command of General Don Rodrigo de Torres y Morales, left Havana harbor with nineteen ships bound for Spain. In its cargo, over 12 million pesos in gold, silver and gems, and untold millions in unregistered treasure. Two days later, on July 15, 1733, the fleet was struck by a hurricane off the Florida Keys. Only 1 ship, the El Africa, was able to survive the storm and sailed back to Havana. The rest of the fleet had either sunk, run aground, or were dismasted.
The final resting places of the ships were forgotten until 1938 when Captain Reggie Roberts, and ex-Navy diver, Art McKee, discovered a large rock pile with cannons. The remnants turned out to be the fleets’ flagship, Capitana el Rubi. Thus, ushering in the dawn of treasure hunting in the Florida Keys.
The wrecks of the 1733 fleet were salvaged for many years until The Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary Act of 1990. Leaving two ships of the 1733 fleet undiscovered to this day; they are the San Fernando and the El Floridano. The remaining wreck sites are now designated as historical places in the National Register.