page_title: July 1901
section_title: July 24, 1901 (Wednesday)
hierarchical_section_title: July 1901 / July 24, 1901 (Wednesday)
caption_attribution_description: William Sydney Porter
context_page_description: The following events occurred in July 1901:
context_section_description: American author William Sidney Porter, who would write under the pen name of O. Henry was released from the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus, Ohio after serving three years of a five-year sentence for embezzlement from the First National Bank in Austin, Texas.  In 1902, he would move to New York City and begin the most prolific phase of his writing career, including a new short story every week for the New York World Sunday Magazine supplement.  Literary critic Guy Davenport offers the theory of Porter that "The pseudonym that he began to write under in prison is constructed from the Oh of Ohio and the en and ry in penitentiary (he gives the code for this in the story "The Man Higher Up," in which a con man named Alfred E. Ricks is caught but returns to the game as A. L. Fredericks)."  
  The American battleship USS Kearsarge inadvertently fired an armed shell at the city of Newport, Rhode Island and struck the Newport City Hall.  The ship had been performing a routine gunnery drill and was firing toward the shore, when the officers realized that a live shell had been inadvertently loaded in with the dummy ammunition used for such tests.  "The shell hit one of the great, granite blocks of the second story" of the Hall, a report noted the next day, "within fifteen inches of an open window where people were standing, making a hole an inch deep, glanced against the stone balcony, then took another direction, passing up Bull Street until it struck a tree, where it tore off a branch several inches in diameter and burst into fragments."   Half an hour after the shot was fired, two officers arrived and determined that the fragments were those of a one-pound shell.  Remarkably, nobody was injured even though the streets had been filled with people when the shot hit shortly after 5:00 in the afternoon.
  General Zurbano, a holdout in the Philippine resistance to American rule, surrendered to the U.S. Army in Tayabas Province on Luzon, along with 518 troops and 29 of his officers.
  Born: Mabel Albertson, American actress (died 1982)
caption: "O. Henry"
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