June 17: House Judiciary subcommittee meets regarding H.R. 40 bill, which would set up a commission to create reparations for slavery as part of a move to follow through on Civil War-era promises.

June 25: San Francisco votes to ban the sale of e-cigarettes, both in stores and online. The so-called “Juul ban” is the first of its kind in the United States.

June 30: Trump becomes the first sitting commander-in-chief to travel to North Korea. There, he meets with Kim Jong-un at the Korean Demilitarized Zone.

July 7: The United States Women’s Soccer Team wins the Women’s World Cup for the fourth time, scoring a victory in Lyon, France against the Netherlands.  

July 14: Trump tells four congresswomen of color to “go back” to where they came from, adding that they should “help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came” before “loudly and viciously” telling Congress how to govern.

July 17: The World Health Organization declares a public health emergency in response to the year-long Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 

July 24: Boris Johnson, the Conservative former foreign secretary and London mayor, is officially in-stated as the British prime minister, succeeding Theresa May.

July 28: Lil Nas X breaks the record for longest-running No. 1 hit single on Billboard’s Hot 100 list with “Old Town Road” topping the charts for 17 weeks. 

Aug 5: Victoria’s Secret casts Valentina Sampaio, the company’s first openly transgender model.

Aug 6: Toni Morrison, the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature, dies at 88. Her work as a novelist continues to be hailed for its eloquent prose depicting the black experience in America.

Aug 8: The United Nations issues a report warning that the world’s food and water resources are being exploited at “unprecedented rates.”

Aug 10: Jeffrey Epstein, the financier accused of sex trafficking and abuse of myriad teenage girls, commits suicide while in jail before his hearing.

Aug 23: Alarmingly large swaths are ablaze in the Amazon, inciting international fear for the worlds’ forests. Additional unprecedented fires rage in Siberia, Alaska, the Canary Islands, and Greenland. 

Aug 28: Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg successfully arrives in New York after two weeks venturing across the Atlantic on board a carbon-neutral sailboat. 

This piece also appears in our September 2019 print edition.