What Was July 4th Like Before The Fourth Of July?

It’s the 243rd birthday of the United States!

You don’t need me to tell you this is a big deal in a lot of communities.

There are parades, fireworks, parties, lots of flags, and John Stamos hosting that concert outside the US Capitol…

243 years makes for a lot of celebrating.

But what were people doing on the Fourth of July before American independence?

One of the most interesting stories goes back nearly a millennium.

July 4, 1054, in China.

Astronomers there would make note of anything new they spotted in the sky; they would call these new objects “guest stars.”

On this day, 954 years ago, the astronomers wrote down that they’d seen such a guest star appear in the constellation Taurus.

It was bright, and it lingered; the astronomers would note that nearly two years later the guest star became invisible.

The Anasazi people in what is now the southwestern United States seem to have recorded this same guest star.

There may have been a sighting in Europe as well.

So what was it?

The gas cloud remnants of a supernova, one of the most famous ever spotted.

It’s now known as the Crab Nebula, and it was first recorded as a nebula in the 18th century, some 700 years after it was first spotted in the sky.

A Fourth of July firework of sorts, centuries before Independence Day.

If you need a break from the parades and fireworks and grilled things in most of the country today, you could head to Oatman, Arizona.

That community holds a different kind of July 4th celebration: the Sidewalk Egg Frying Challenge!

Participants have 15 minutes, starting at noon, to turn their two cracked eggs into a meal.

They can use any method they want, as long as it doesn’t include fire or electricity.

You might think a town in Arizona might not want to spend time out on the open sidewalks in July.

But as one of the organizers put it, it’s Arizona in the summer.

That’s who they are!