Coldest July or Warmest July?

It depends on where you look on the map.

The blue areas were colder in July, the red areas were hotter in July, and the other colors were in-between degrees. Thus, depending on the location the answer is "both".

If you look at only the local data in some northern states you can argue that it was one of the coldest July's, but if you look else where you can find it was the hottest July.

As we have pointed out here, the big picture is the true picture and the big picture is the global picture:

NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) has determined that July of 2009 was the second warmest July globally, since records were kept going back well over a hundred years.

(Huffington Post, AccuWeather, emphasis added). If you want to be intellectually honest about global climate you can't cite the weather in Paducah, Kentucky as the true picture for the entire global reality.

Proper analysis also depends on whether you are talking land mass or oceans, because there is some evidence that "July was the hottest the world's oceans have been in almost 130 years of record-keeping."