July 7 · This Day in America
President McKinley signs the Newlands Resolution and the Hawaiian Islands become American territory. The road there is not a clean one. Five years earlier, American businessmen backed by U.S. Marines had overthrown Queen Lili'uokalani; the year before annexation, more than 21,000 Native Hawaiians — over half the Native population — had signed a petition begging Congress not to take their kingdom. Congress took it anyway, in the heat of a war with Spain, for the harbor and the strategic ocean. A sovereign nation, with its own queen and its own flag, was absorbed into another. It is a date the United States cannot tell only one way: the reach of a rising power, and the people whose country it was first. Both are true, and the 250th holds both.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1865
Less than three months after Lincoln's murder, four convicted conspirators are hanged at the Old Arsenal Penitentiary in Washington — David Herold, Lewis Powell, George Atzerodt, and Mary Surratt. Surratt is the first woman ever executed by the United States government, her guilt still argued by historians. Soldiers had built the gallows that morning. The war was over; the reckoning for the man who held it together was swift, public, and grim.
Source: fords.org