Portal:United States/Anniversaries/August/August 7
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- 1782 – General George Washington orders the creation of the Badge of Military Merit (pictured) to honor soldiers wounded in battle. It is later renamed the Purple Heart, after its appearance.
- 1927 – The Peace Bridge, a bridge between Fort Erie, Ontario and Buffalo, New York, opens.
- 1944 – IBM officially presents the electro-mechanical computer Harvard Mark I, (originally named the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator), to Harvard University. While not the first computer, the Mark I was comparatively fast and reliable among early computers, and has been called "the beginning of the era of the modern computer".
- 1964 – Congress passes the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving President Lyndon B. Johnson broad war powers to deal with North Vietnamese attacks on American forces.
- 1978 – President Jimmy Carter declares that the situation at Love Canal, a residential community built on what had at one time been a toxic waste dump, is a federal emergency. The declaration would allow for federal emergency funds to be used in the cleanup of the site, marking the first time that federal emergency funds were used other than for the handling of natural disasters.
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