1349 – Gunther of Schwarzburg chosen German anti-king
1349 – Jews of Freilsburg Germany are massacred
1647 – After nine months of negotiations, Scottish Presbyterians sell captured Charles I to English Parliament for around £100,000
1649 – England’s King Charles I was beheaded.
1661 – Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England is ritually executed after having been dead for two years
1797 – US Congress refuses to accept 1st petition from African American
1798 – The first brawl in the U.S. House of Representatives took place. Congressmen Matthew Lyon and Roger Griswold fought on the House floor.
1806 – The original Lower Trenton Toll Bridge, which spans the Delaware River between Morrisville, Pennsylvania and Trenton, New Jersey, is opened. A later bridge opened in 1935 is also known as the Trenton Makes – the World Takes Bridge.
1815 – Burned US Library of Congress re-established with Thomas Jefferson’s 6,500 volumes
1835 – Richard Lawrence misfires at President Andrew Jackson in Washington, D.C. in 1st attempted assassination of a US President
1862 – The U.S. Navy’s first ironclad warship, the “Monitor”, was launched.
1889 – Rudolph, crown prince of Austria, and his 17-year-old mistress, Baroness Marie Vetsera, were found shot in his hunting lodge at Mayerling, near Vienna.
1902 – Britain and Japan sign a treaty after months of negotiating which commits each country to supporting an independent China and Korea, although it acknowledges Japan’s ‘special interest’ in Korea
1933 – President Paul von Hindenburg appoints Adolf Hitler as Reich Chancellor of Germany who forms a government with Franz von Papen
1933 – “The Lone Ranger” was heard on radio for the first time. The program ran for 2,956 episodes and ended in 1955.
1945 – American Rangers and Filipino resistance fighters liberate over 500 Allied POWs from Japanese at Cabanatuan
1948 – Indian political and spiritual leader Mahatma Gandhi was murdered by a Hindu extremist.
1956 – Martin Luther King Jr.s home bombed
1957 – US Congress accepts “Eisenhower-doctrine”
1962 – Two members of the “Flying Wallendas” high-wire act were killed when their seven-person pyramid collapsed during a performance in Detroit, MI.
1963 – Ivan Sutherland submits a thesis containing his Sketchpad program, a forerunner to modern-day graphic user interfaces and computer-aided design programs
1968 – The Tet Offensive began as Communist forces launched surprise attacks against South Vietnamese provincial capitals.
1972 – Bloody Sunday: 27 unarmed civilians are shot (14 are killed) by the British Army during a civil rights march in Derry, Northern Ireland; this is the highest death toll from a single shooting incident during ‘the Troubles’
1973 – Jury finds Watergate defendants Liddy & McCord guilty on all counts of conspiracy, burglary, and illegal wiretapping
1979 – The civilian government of Iran announced it had decided to allow Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to return. He had been living in exile in France.
1982 – The first computer virus is released “into the wild”. Elk Cloner was created by 15-year-old Richard Skrenta as a practical joke.
1992 – Inventor Ray Kurzweil publishes his first book “The Age of Intelligent Machines” on artificial intelligence, predicting the popularity of the internet
1995 – The U.N. Security Council authorized the deployment of a 6,000-member U.N. peace-keeping contingent to assume security responsibilities in Haiti from U.S. forces.
1996 – Gino Gallagher, the reputed leader of the Irish National Liberation Army, was shot and killed as he queued for his unemployment benefit.
1997 – A New Jersey judge ruled that the unborn child of a female prisoner must have legal representation. He denied the prisoner bail reduction to enable her to leave the jail and obtain an abortion.
2003 – Richard Reid sentenced to life in prison for attempting to bomb an American Airlines flight with 197 on board
2014 – 24 hostages are killed after 6 suicide bombers temporarily take over the Iraqi Ministry of Transportation in Baghdad
2016 – Boko Haram militants on motorcycles attack Dalori village near Maiduguri, Nigeria, killing at least 65 and injuring 136
2017 – In China, scientist revealed 540-million-year-old Saccorhytus in a fossil. The actual creature would have been about a millimeter in size.
2019 – Continuous 24 hr church mass lasting 97 days to prevent deportation of Armenian asylum seekers ends after Dutch authorities reconsider at Protestant Bethel Church in The Hague
2019 – Scientists reveal discovery of cavity six miles long, 1,000 feet deep under Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica, leading to fears it might collapse and raise sea levels by two feet
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
