1860 – The first Pony Express riders left St. Joseph, MO and Sacramento, CA. The trip across country took about 10 days. The Pony Express only lasted about a year and a half.
1043 – Edward the Confessor crowned King of England
1312 – 2nd council of Vienna, Knights Templars suppressed
1367 – Battle of Navarrete [Nájera], La Rioja, Castile: alliance of King Peter of Castile and the English defeats Count Henry of Castile
1513 – Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon landed in Florida. He had sighted the land the day before.
1559 – Philip II of Spain and Henry II of France sign the peace of Cateau-Cambresis, ending a long series of wars between the Hapsburg and Valois dynasties.
1645 – English Long Parliament passes the Self-Denying Ordinance, limiting regional armies, significant step toward New Model Army
1764 – Austrian Archduke Jozef crowned himself Holy Roman Emperor Josef II
1776 – George Washington received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Harvard College .
1829 – James Carrington patented the coffee mill.
1834 – The generals in the Greek War of Independence stand trial for treason.
1856 – Palace of the Grand Master of the Knights of Rhodes badly damaged by gunpowder explosion, kills 4,000 on island of Rhodes
1860 – The first Pony Express riders left St. Joseph, MO and Sacramento, CA. The trip across country took about 10 days. The Pony Express only lasted about a year and a half.
1862 – Slavery is abolished in Washington, D.C.
1865 – Union forces occupy Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia.
1882 – The American outlaw Jesse James was shot in the back and killed by Robert Ford for a $5,000 reward. There was later controversy over whether it was actually Jesse James that had been killed.
1910 – Alaska’s Mt. McKinley, the highest mountain in North America was climbed.
1913 – British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst sentenced to 3 years in jail
1918 – US House of Representatives accepts American Creed written by William Tyler
1924 – Istanbul’s Ottoman Topkapi Palace is converted into a museum on orders of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
1933 – First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt informed newspaper reporters that beer would be served at the White House. This followed the March 22 legislation that legalized “3.2” beer.
1936 – Richard Bruno Hauptmann was executed for the kidnapping and death of the son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh.
1940 – Soviet troops massacre about 22,000 Polish nationals, The Katyn massacre is considered the worst massacre of prisoners of war in history. The order to execute all captive members of the Polish Officer Corps was signed by Joseph Stalin.
1941 – British Prime Minister Winston Churchill warns Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that a German invasion is imminent
1942 – The Japanese began their all-out assault on the U.S. and Filipino troops at Bataan.
1944 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules that black citizens are eligible to vote in all elections, including primaries.
1946 – Lt. General Masaharu Homma, the Japanese commander responsible for the Bataan Death March, was executed in the Philippines.
1948 – U.S. President Harry Truman signed the Marshall Plan to revive war-torn Europe. It was $5 billion in aid for 16 countries.
1952 – Dutch Queen Juliana speaks to US Congress
1955 – The American Civil Liberties Union announces it will defend Allen Ginsberg’s book “Howl” against obscenity charges
1967 – The U.S. State Department said that Hanoi might be brainwashing American prisoners.
1968 – Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “mountaintop” speech just 24 hours before he was assassinated.
1968 – North Vietnam agreed to meet with U.S. representatives to set up preliminary peace talks.
1969 – Vietnam War: U.S. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird announces that the United States will start a policy of “Vietnamization”, reducing American involvement
1970 – As part of a new ‘get tough’ policy in Northern Ireland, Ian Freeland of the British Army, warned that those throwing petrol bombs could be shot dead
1972 – Charlie Chaplin returned to the U.S. after a twenty-year absence.
1979 – Jane Byrne became the first female mayor in Chicago.
1983 – It was reported that Vietnamese occupation forces had overrun a key insurgent base in western Cambodia.
1984 – Sikh terrorists killed a member of the Indian Parliament in his home.
1984 – Col. Lansana Konte became the new president of Guinea when the armed forces seized power after the death of Sekou Toure.
1985 – The U.S. charged that Israel violated the Geneva Convention by deporting Shiite prisoners.
1986 – The U.S. national debt hit $2 trillion.
1987 – Riots disrupted mass during the Pope’s visit to Santiago, Chili.
1996 – An Air Force jetliner carrying Commerce Secretary Ron Brown crashed in Croatia, killing all 35 people aboard.
1996 – Unabomber suspect Theodore Kaczynski was arrested. He pled guilty in January 1998 to five Unabomber attacks in exchange for a life sentence without chance for parole.
1997 – Thalit massacre begins in Algeria; all but 1 of the 53 inhabitants of Thalit are killed by guerrillas
2000 – A U.S. federal judge ruled that Microsoft had violated U.S. antitrust laws by keeping “an oppressive thumb” on its competitors. Microsoft said that they would appeal the ruling.
2004 – Islamic terrorists involved in the 11 March 2004 Madrid attacks are trapped by the police in their apartment and kill themselves
2012 – Spanish unemployment reaches record high, youth unemployment stands at 50%
2013 – 46 people are killed and 100 are injured by a court-house suicide bombing in Farah, Afghanistan
2016 – Panama Papers published – 11.5 million confidential documents from offshore law firm Mossack Fonseca expose widespread illegal activities including fraud, kleptocracy, tax evasion and the violation of international sanctions by the world’s elite in the world’s largest ever data leak
2017 – Bomb on St Petersburg metro kills 11, 2nd bomb defused
2019 – Brunei brings into force new Sharia laws punishing gay sex and adultery with death by stoning, prompting widespread condemnation
2020 – US aircraft carrier captain Brett Crozier cheered off his ship after being fired for a letter demanding more help for his sailors infected with COVID-19
2022 – Pakistan plunges into constitutional crisis after Prime Minister Imran Khan dissolves parliament and calls for new elections, avoiding a no-confidence vote
2022 – The Taliban government bans cultivation of opium in Afghanistan, with consequences for world supply as it produces 80%
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
