In Scotland, a railway engine of the Edinburgh, Perth, and Dundee Railway was returning for the day to the yards in Edinburgh when it crashed over an embankment near Granton and plunged into the Firth of Forth.  Four of the five people aboard were killed.  (By John Osborne) 

Electoral tensions and paranoia among whites had led in July, 1860 to the "Texas Slave Insurrection Panic."  Anthony Bewley, a fifty-six year old white Methodist preacher accused of violent abolitionism, had fled his parish in Johnson County, Texas.  Vigilantes, however, tracked him to Missouri and returned him to Fort Worth, Texas on September 3, 1860.  Ten days later, late at night, a mob removed him from the town jail and hanged him from a pecan tree.  His skeleton was exhibited for several years on the roof of a storehouse in Fort Worth.  (By John Osborne)

On July 8, 1860, fires sparked by a heat wave had caused heavy damage in towns in Denton County, Texas and elsewhere.  The editor of the Dallas Herald, Charles Pryor, had been completely burned out and on this day had published in several North Texas newspapers a lengthly accusation, with evidence, that the fires were the result of an abolitionist plot to instigate a slave insurrection.  This marked the beginning of a panic among whites in Texas that cost the lives of scores African Americans in the coming weeks.  (By John Osborne) 

On an afternoon of extreme high temperatures, a devastating fire struck the small town of Dallas, Texas.  Most of the center of the town swiftly burned to the ground and damage was estimated a highly as $300,000.  On the same day, in other places in Denton County, in Denton and Pilot Point, similar fires struck.  The cause in all these fires was probably the "tinder box" conditions of wooden buildings but the simultaneous outbreaks began the "Texas Slave Insurrection Panic" among whites that cost the lives of scores of African American in Texas in the following weeks.  (By John Osborne)  

Abraham Cahan was born in a Jewish slum in Vilna, Lithuania into a devout family of teachers.  He entered state school, became a socialist, and was forced to flee, arriving in New York City in 1882.  He became a successful socialist activist amongst the poor Jewish population of the city by propagandizing in Yiddish rather than the usual Russian.  Combining moderate socialism with respect for Jewish culture and traditions, he edited the Jewish Daily Forward from 1902 to 1946.  Forward's 250,000 readers made it the world's leading Yiddish newspaper.  Cahan died in 1951.  (By John Osborne)