July 4, 2019

A Big Mac cost $3.99 that summer of 2019, and the Dow Jones sat at 28,538 — as tensions with Iran escalated after the country shot down a U.S. surveillance drone over the Strait of Hormuz that June, signaling a summer of uneasy standoffs in the Middle East. On the cultural side, Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus held the number one spot on the charts for weeks with "Old Town Road," while Delia Owens's novel "Where the Crawdads Sing" sat firmly atop the New York Times fiction bestseller list. That July, NOAA confirmed it had been the hottest month ever recorded on Earth, with global temperatures running nearly one degree Celsius above the 20th-century average — a new benchmark in the ongoing measurement of the planet's climate record.