July 9

On July 12, 1917, in the copper town of Bisbee, Arizona, a thousand-plus miners and suspected labor organizers—many recent immigrants and Mexican nationals—were rounded up by deputized posses, loaded into boxcars and cattle cars, and carried into the New Mexico desert, where they were dumped without food or shelter. The mass expulsion, driven by company power, wartime fears, and local vigilante organization, became a landmark episode in American labor and civil‑liberties history.

On July 11, 1918, while anchored in Tokuyama Bay, the Imperial Japanese Navy dreadnought Kawachi suffered a catastrophic internal magazine explosion that broke her back and sank her in shallow water. The blast killed 621 crewmen, prompted wide‑ranging inquiries into magazine safety and the handling of Shimose explosives, and led the navy to revise storage, firefighting and magazine protections across the fleet.

On the night of July 8, 1988, the Island Express plunged from a low-level bridge over Ashtamudi Lake at Peruman, near Kollam in Kerala. Multiple coaches derailed and fell into the shallow water; 105 people were killed and roughly 200 injured. Local fishermen, villagers, police and railway staff mounted a frantic rescue and recovery that unfolded through the night and into the next day.