1865 – U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in Ford’s Theater by John Wilkes Booth. He actually died early the next morning. Abraham Lincoln’s Assassination – Timeline, Facts & Aftermath (history.com)
43 BC – Battle of Forum Gallorum: Mark Antony, besieging Julius Caesar’s assassin Decimus Junius Brutus in Mutina, defeats the forces of the consul Pansa, who is killed.
0193 – Lucius Septimius Severus crowned Emperor of Rome
0966 – Christianisation of Poland – Polish ruler Mieszko I and his court baptized
1028 – German emperor Conrad II the Sailor crowns his son Henry III, king
1361 – Henry of Grosmont, the richest peer in England, is buried at the Church of the Annunciation of Our Lady of Newarke, Leicester, with the royal family in attendance
1434 – The foundation stone of Cathedral St. Peter and St. Paul in Nantes, France is laid
1471 – The Earl of Warwick, who fought on both sides in the War of the Roses, is killed at the Battle of Barnet with the defeat of the Lancastrians.
1543 – Bartolome Ferrelo returns to Spain after discovering a large bay in the New World (San Francisco).
1570 – Polish Calvinists, Lutherans and Hernhutters unify against Jesuits
1671 – Cossacks capture Russian peasant leader Stenka Razin
1699 – Khalsa: Birth of Khalsa, the brotherhood of the Sikh religion, in Northern India in accordance with the Nanakshahi calendar
1775 – The first abolitionist society in U.S. was organized in Philadelphia with Ben Franklin as president.
1793 – A royalist rebellion in Santo Domingo was crushed by French republican troops.
1828 – The first edition of Noah Webster’s dictionary was published under the name “American Dictionary of the English Language.”
1836 – US Congress forms Territory of Wisconsin
1841 – 1st detective story published, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in Rue Morgue”
1860 – The first Pony Express rider arrived in San Francisco with mail originating in St. Joseph, MO.
1865 – U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in Ford’s Theater by John Wilkes Booth. He actually died early the next morning. https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/abraham-lincoln-assassination
1865 – U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward and his family are attacked in his home by Lewis Powell as part of the same conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln
1889 – The first international Conference of American States began in Washington, DC.
1894 – First public showing of Thomas Edison’s kinetoscope took place.
1900 – The World Exposition opens in Paris.
1902 – James Cash (J.C.) Penney opened his first retail store in Kemmerer, WY. It was called the Golden Rule Store.
1906 – US President Theodore Roosevelt denounces “muckrakers” in US press, taken from John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress
1910 – U.S. President William Howard Taft threw out the first ball for the Washington Senators and the Philadelphia Athletics.
1912 – The passenger liner Titanic–deemed unsinkable–strikes an iceberg on her maiden voyage and begins to sink. The ship will go under the next day with a loss of 1,500 lives.
1914 – Dr. Harry Plotz isolates the bacteria that causes Typhus Fever (Mt. Sinai Hospital, New York City)
1918 – The U.S. First Aero Squadron engaged in America’s first aerial dogfight with enemy aircraft over Toul, France.
1925 – WGN became the first radio station to broadcast a regular season major league baseball game. The Cubs beat the Pirates 8-2.
1931 – King Alfonso XIII of Spain went into exile and the Spanish Republic was proclaimed.
1935 – Black Sunday: Severe dust storm ravages the US Midwest, led to the region being named “the Dust Bowl”
1939 – The John Steinbeck novel “The Grapes of Wrath” was first published.
1943 – A JN-25 decrypt by American intelligence detailing a forthcoming visit by Marshal Admiral Yamamoto to Balalae Island results in his plane shot down 4 days later
1945 – American B-29 bombers damage the Imperial Palace during firebombing raid over Tokyo.
1946 – The civil war between Communists and nationalist resumed in China.
1953 – The Viet Minh invade Laos with 40,00 troops in their war against French colonial forces.
1956 – Ampex Corporation of Redwood City, CA, demonstrated the first commercial magnetic tape recorder for sound and picture.
1959 – The Taft Memorial Bell Tower was dedicated in Washington, DC.
1969 – For the first time, a major league baseball game was played in Montreal, Canada.
1971 – US President Richard Nixon ends blockade against People’s Republic of China
1973 – Acting FBI director L. Patrick Gray resigns after admitting he destroyed evidence in the Watergate scandal
1977 – US Supreme Court says people may refuse to display state motto on license
1978 – Thousands of Georgians demonstrate in the capital Tbilisi against Soviet attempts to change the constitutional status of the Georgian language
1981 – America’s first space shuttle, Columbia, returned to Earth after a three-day test flight. The shuttle orbited the Earth 36 times during the mission.
1984 – The Texas Board of Education began requiring that the state’s public school textbooks describe the evolution of human beings as “theory rather than fact”.
1985 – The Russian paper “Pravda” called U.S. President Reagan’s planned visit to Bitburg to visit the Nazi cemetery an “act of blasphemy”.
1986 – U.S. President Reagan announced the U.S. air raid on military and terrorist related targets in Libya.
1987 – Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev proposed banning all missiles from Europe.
1988 – Representatives from the U.S.S.R., Pakistan, Afghanistan and the U.S. signed an agreement that called for the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan starting on May 15. The last Soviet troop left Afghanistan on February 15, 1989.
1992 – Court throws out Apple’s lawsuit against Microsoft
1994 – Two American F-15 warplanes inadvertently shot down two U.S. helicopters over northern Iraq. 26 people were killed including 15 Americans.
1998 – The state of Virginia ignored the requests from the World Court and executed a Paraguayan for the murder of a U.S. woman.
1999 – Pakistan test-fired a ballistic missile that was capable of carrying a nuclear warhead and reaching its rival neighbor India.
2000 – After five years of deadlock, Russia approved the START II treaty that calls for the scrapping of U.S. and Russian nuclear warheads. The Russian government warned it would abandon all arms-control pacts if Washington continued with an anti-missile system.
2000 – Metallica file a lawsuit against P2P sharing phenomenon Napster. This lawsuit eventually leads the movement against file-sharing programs.
2002 – U.S. President George W. Bush sent a letter of congratulations to JCPenny’s associates for being in business for 100 years. James Cash (J.C.) Penney had opened his first retail store on April 14, 1902.
2002 – Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez returned to office two days after being arrested by his country’s military.
2003 – The Human Genome Project is completed, The project dedicated to mapping the genes of the human genome was started in October 1990.
2003 – U.S. troops in Baghdad capture Abu Abbas, leader of the Palestinian group that killed an American on the hijacked cruise liner the Achille Lauro in 1985
2005 – The Oregon Supreme Court nullifies marriage licenses issued to gay couples a year earlier by Multnomah County
2010 – Icelandic Volcano Eyjafjallajökull begins erupting from the top crater in the centre of the glacier
2013 – 20 people are killed in attacks in Mogadishu, Somalia
2015 – Archaeologists announce they have found at Lomekwi in Kenya 3.3 million-year old stone tools, the oldest ever discovered and which pre-date the earliest humans
2017 – Meethotamulla rubbish dump collapses onto houses in Colombo, Sri Lanka killing 26
2018 – US, UK and French forces carry out airstrikes on sites associated with Syria’s chemical weapons program, in response to Douma gas attack
2019 – Seychelles President Danny Faure makes first-ever live speech from a submersible pleading for better marine protection
2020 – Parts of Europe begin to ease lockdown restrictions after 5-6 weeks with some shops opening in Austria and parts of Italy
2020 – US President Donald Trump freezes funding for the World Health Organization pending a review, for mistakes in handling the COVID-19 pandemic and for being “China-centric”, prompting international criticism
2022 – Russian ship Moskva, flagship of its Black Sea fleet, sinks in the Black Sea during the invasion of Ukraine amid conflicting accounts
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
