1043 – Edward the Confessor crowned King of England
1513 – Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon landed in Florida. He had sighted the land the day before.
1645 – English Long Parliament passes the Self-Denying Ordinance, limiting regional armies, significant step toward New Model Army
1657 – English Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell refuses crown
1848 – German explorer Ludwig Leichhardt is seen for the last time at McPherson’s Station, Coogoon, before he disappears on the same expedition to reach the Swan River in Australia
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.
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.
1882 – Wood block alarm invented, when alarm rang, it dropped 20 wood blocks
1936 – Richard Bruno Hauptmann was executed for the kidnapping and death of the son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh.
1941 – British Prime Minister Winston Churchill warns Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that a German invasion is imminent
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.
1944 – US Supreme Court (Smith v Allwright) “white primaries” unconstitutional
1948 – U.S. President Harry Truman signed the Marshall Plan to revive war-torn Europe. It was $5 billion in aid for 16 countries.
1955 – The American Civil Liberties Union announces it will defend Allen Ginsberg’s book “Howl” against obscenity charges
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
1972 – Charlie Chaplin returned to the U.S. after a twenty-year absence.
1973 – The first public mobile telephone call is placed on a Manhattan sidewalk – Motorola’s Martin Cooper called Joel Engel of Bell Labs. He later told the BBC that his first words were “Joel, I’m calling you from a ‘real’ cellular telephone. A portable handheld telephone.”
1984 – Sikh terrorists killed a member of the Indian Parliament in his home.
1985 – The U.S. charged that Israel violated the Geneva Convention by deporting Shiite prisoners.
1986 – The U.S. national debt hit $2 trillion.
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
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
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
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
