July 11 Birthday

Famous Birthdays on July 11

• John Quincy Adams (1767)

  6th President of the United States and later a long-serving anti-slavery congressman.

• E. B. White (1899)

  American writer known for Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and co-authoring The Elements of Style.

• Yul Brynner (1920)

  Actor known for The King and I, for which he won an Academy Award; Brynner was famously evasive about his exact birth year and origins throughout his life.

• Sela Ward (1956)

  American actress known for Sisters and House.

This Day in History

• 1804 — Vice President Aaron Burr fatally shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel in Weehawken, New Jersey.

• 1979 — The abandoned U.S. space station Skylab re-entered Earth's atmosphere, scattering debris over the Indian Ocean and parts of Western Australia.

• 1995 — Bosnian Serb forces began the massacre of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica, the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II.

• 1804 — Alexander Hamilton died the day after the duel from his wound, at age 49.

• 1987 — The United Nations marked this date as the symbolic 'Day of Five Billion,' the estimated day the world's population reached five billion people, which later led the UN to designate July 11 as World Population Day.

What July 11 Says About You

The Hamilton-Burr duel is one of those historical events so frequently referenced it's easy to forget it happened on an actual, specific July morning. On July 11, 1804, sitting Vice President Aaron Burr shot Alexander Hamilton in Weehawken, New Jersey, ending the life of one of the American founding generation's most consequential and complicated figures over an accumulation of personal and political grievances. It's a stark entry for a date that otherwise trends toward the quieter, more reflective end of the spectrum. E. B. White, born July 11, 1899, built a career on exactly that kind of quiet precision — Charlotte's Web is a children's book about mortality and friendship handled with almost no sentimentality, and The Elements of Style remains the most influential writing guide of the 20th century precisely because of its restraint. John Quincy Adams, born on this date in 1767, spent his post-presidency decades as a tireless anti-slavery voice in Congress, a second act many historians consider more consequential than his single term as president — proof that a July 11 birthday doesn't require an explosive single moment to leave a lasting mark. Persistence and emotional endurance are the hallmarks of Cancer, the sign that claims this date, evident in Adams's decades-long congressional fight and in Yul Brynner's insistence on controlling his own origin story; Brynner gave varying, sometimes contradictory accounts of his birthplace and exact age throughout his career, a small but genuine mystery that never fully resolved even after his death. The numerology reduction of the 11th preserves itself as a master number, 11, traditionally associated with heightened intuition and idealism rather than reducing further to 2 — a fitting pairing for a date whose defining historical event, the Hamilton-Burr duel, still generates genuine debate among historians about motive, honor codes, and what exactly either man intended. Skylab's uncontrolled re-entry on July 11, 1979 scattered debris across Western Australia in a moment of genuine, if largely harmless, global anxiety, while the Srebrenica massacre that began on this date in 1995 stands as one of the darkest events in modern European history, a somber counterweight that resists any tidy thematic framing. Ruby and larkspur remain in their usual gentle, understated role here. July 11's real history resists a single unifying thread — it holds a founding-era tragedy, a literary craftsman's quiet legacy, a falling space station, and one of the gravest atrocities of the late 20th century, all within the same 24 hours across different years. The United Nations later chose this same date, tied to the symbolic 1987 'Day of Five Billion,' to mark World Population Day, adding a quieter, forward-looking entry about collective human scale to a date otherwise dominated by singular, sharply individual events.