12 July 1862 – During the Civil War President Lincoln signed into law the Army Medal of Honor. In December 1861 the Navy’s version of the Medal of Honor had been approved. The first US Army Medal of Honor would be presented on 25 March 1863 to Private Jacob Parrot.
12 July 1864 – During the Battle of Fort Stevens during the Civil War, in the northwest of of Washington D.C, President Lincoln becomes the first standing President to view witness a battle.
16 July 1945 – Code Name Trinity, the first detonation of a nuclear device. At 5:29 am in the Jornada del Muerto desert the US Army would test a nuclear device for the first time under the Manhattan Project. “The Gadget”, as it was informally known, was of the same design as the Fat Boy bomb dropped later on Nagasaki. The device would explode with a yield of 22 kilotons of TNT and would begin the atomic age and help end WW2.
17 July 2003 – The Pentagon announced that US casualties from hostile fire in Iraq had reached 147. This number was a milestone as it was the same amount of casualties as the entirety of the first Gulf War. By the end of the war on 2011 nearly 4,000 American troops would be killed in action and with total casualties reaching over 36,000 in total.