July 7th Through Time: Hawaii’s Turning Point & Birthdays That Shaped History

On July seventh, 1898, President William McKinley signed a piece of paper called the Newlands Resolution. Yesterday, in our look at July sixth, we talked about the quiet beginnings that shaped our world. Well. Today is a bit louder. That signature by McKinley effectively ended the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Hawaii and brought the islands into the possession of the United States. It was a moment that looked, to many in America at the time, like destiny. Like progress. From where we stand now, it looks… a great deal more complicated. It’s a reminder that history is rarely a straight line, and that the meaning of an event is never truly settled on the day it happens.

The ink dries, but the story is just beginning. And July seventh seems to be a day for these kinds of complicated, consequential beginnings. A generation later, on this same date in 1937, a single gunshot near the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing became the spark that ignited the Second Sino-Japanese War. A conflict that would consume millions of lives and eventually merge into the inferno of the Second World War. It’s a chilling thought—how an entire era of unimaginable violence can pivot on one incident, on one day. But then, the day turns again. On July seventh, 1981, another signature, this time from President Ronald Reagan. He nominated a judge from Arizona named Sandra Day O’Connor to the United States Supreme Court.

With that nomination, a barrier that had stood for nearly two hundred years was broken. She would become the first woman to serve on the nation’s highest court. It was a profoundly hopeful act, a correction, a step toward a more complete idea of justice. So you have these three moments, all on one date. An act of annexation. An act of war. An act of inclusion. What a strange and potent combination. And as if that weren’t enough, the universe decided to pepper this date with creators, with people who would build entire worlds of their own. On July seventh, 1860, the composer Gustav Mahler was born. The man who would try to pack the entire universe, its joys and its terrors, into a symphony.

Twenty-seven years later, in 1887, the artist Marc Chagall arrives, ready to paint our dreams and our folklore in colors that seemed to float right off the canvas. Then comes 1907, and with it, Robert A. Heinlein, one of the grand masters of science fiction who would sketch out the futures we’re still arguing about and aiming for. And finally, in 1940, a baby is born in Liverpool who would provide the steady, joyful, and deeply human heartbeat for a global revolution in music. Richard Starkey. You know him as Ringo Starr. So, a composer, a painter, a writer, a drummer. All born on the same day that holds so much political weight. It’s almost as if history is trying to tell us something about balance.

For every act of power, an act of creation. For every border drawn, a world imagined. Let’s go back to that signature in 1898. The annexation of Hawaii. It’s so easy for that to become just a line in a textbook. McKinley signs, Hawaii becomes American territory, and eventually, a state. But that’s not the story. Not the whole story. Looking back from now, we can see that moment not as a beginning, but as an end. The end of a very deliberate, multi-decade process. American business interests, particularly sugar planters, had been growing their power on the islands for years. Just five years before McKinley’s signature, in 1893, those same interests, with the help of U.S.

Marines, had overthrown the constitutional monarch, Queen Liliʻuokalani. She was a brilliant and determined leader who was trying to restore power to native Hawaiians through a new constitution. And for that, she was deposed and placed under house arrest. The provisional government that followed, run by the planters, immediately sought annexation by the United States. The first attempt actually failed. President Grover Cleveland, to his credit, saw the overthrow for what it was—an illegal act of war—and he refused. He called it an "act of war, committed against a peaceful and friendly people." But five years is a long time in politics.

A new president, McKinley, and a new geopolitical urgency with the Spanish-American War, changed the calculation. The Newlands Resolution wasn't a treaty with a sovereign nation; it was a joint resolution of Congress. It was, essentially, an internal American legal maneuver to absorb another country. When we look back at that moment now, we’re not judging McKinley by our standards. We’re simply seeing the full picture that was visible even then, if you knew where to look. We see the clear-eyed resistance of the Hawaiian people, who submitted petitions with tens of thousands of signatures against annexation. We see the debate in the U.S.

itself. The story wasn’t inevitable. It was a choice. And it’s a choice that continues to echo. The questions it raises about sovereignty, about economic power versus political right, about whose history gets to be the official one… those questions are as alive in 2026 as they were in 1898. Now, let’s place that alongside the signature from 1981. Ronald Reagan nominating Sandra Day O’Connor. If the story of Hawaii’s annexation is about the expansion of American power outward, the story of O’Connor’s nomination is about a redefinition of power inward. For the first time, the nine justices would not be an all-male club. The symbolism was… immense.

And it was real. For millions of women, it was a moment of profound recognition. But here’s the turn that hindsight gives us. The story, as it’s often told, ends there. A woman is on the court. The barrier is broken. But the historian’s job is to ask… and then what? What did that actually mean? Sandra Day O’Connor was not a symbol. She was a jurist. A pragmatic, hard-working, often conservative-leaning jurist who, for much of her tenure, found herself as the single deciding vote in a deeply divided court. She wasn’t a predictable ideologue. She was a case-by-case thinker. And because of that, she held an almost unimaginable amount of power.

The future of affirmative action, of voting rights, of reproductive rights—all of it, for years, often came down to one question: what does Justice O’Connor think? And then came the year 2000. The presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. The recounts, the hanging chads, the legal chaos. And it all lands at the Supreme Court. The case of Bush v. Gore. And in a 5-4 decision that effectively stopped the recount and handed the presidency to Bush, the deciding vote was cast by the first woman to ever serve as a Supreme Court justice. Looking back, we can see that her nomination on July seventh, 1981, wasn't just the end of a long exclusion.

It was the beginning of a new kind of power. The power of the swing vote. The power of the center, when the extremes pull everything apart. The moment she joined the court wasn't just about representation. It was about consequence. Her presence changed the outcome of history, not just by being there, but by what she did. And that, I think, is a much more powerful story. So on this one day, July seventh, you have these tectonic shifts. A kingdom is erased by a resolution. A world war is ignited by a gunshot. And the most powerful court in a nation is changed forever by a nomination that was both a historic breakthrough and the start of a whole new chapter of political drama.

And all the while, the seeds of new worlds are being planted by a composer, a painter, a writer, and a drummer. It’s tempting to try and find a neat lesson in all of this. A tidy moral. But history doesn’t really offer those. What it offers are patterns. It offers echoes. The struggle for sovereignty in Hawaii is an echo we hear today in debates all over the world. The way a local conflict can spiral into a global catastrophe is a warning that never gets old. The way a single appointment can reshape a nation’s law for a generation is a lesson in the deep significance of process. History isn't a collection of facts to be memorized. It’s a conversation we are having with the past about the present.

Every signature, every gunshot, every symphony, every drumbeat is a voice in that conversation. And our job is just to learn how to listen. The past is never over. We’re living in its echo.