July 5 in History

In 1954, a young truck driver named Elvis Presley walked into Sun Studio in Memphis, Tennessee, and recorded the songs that would help launch rock and roll into American life. No single moment created the genre, and historians still debate which record deserves to be called the first. But Presley's early Sun sessions are often treated as a turning point, because they brought together sounds from Black and white musical traditions and presented them to a mass youth audience.

In 1962, Algeria became an independent state after 132 years of French rule and an eight-year war of decolonization. The conflict was among the most brutal of the twentieth century's anti-colonial struggles, and its outcome reshaped both Algeria and France, hastening the end of the French empire and bringing down a republic along the way.

In July 1975, Arthur Ashe became the first Black man to win the Wimbledon gentlemen's singles title, defeating the heavily favored Jimmy Connors in the final at the All England Club in London. The victory was one of the great upsets in tennis history, and it cemented Ashe's place as a pioneering figure in a sport that had long been overwhelmingly white and often exclusionary.

In 1995, Jeff Bezos launched an online bookstore that would grow into one of the most influential companies in the world. Amazon began as a way to sell books over the internet, but it went on to reshape retail, publishing, logistics and, through its cloud division, the basic infrastructure of the modern web.