2007 – Virginia Tech massacre: the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history, in which a gunman shoots 32 people to death and injures 23 others before committing suicide.
1457 BC – Battle of Megiddo: Egyptian forces of Thutmose III defeat a large Canaanite coalition under King of Kadesh. First battle recorded with a reliable account.
1178 BC – A solar eclipse may have marked the return of Odysseus, legendary King of Ithaca, to his kingdom after the Trojan War
0069 – Otho committed suicide after being defeated by Vitellius’ troops at Bedriacum.
0073 – Masada, a Jewish fortress, falls to the Romans after several months of siege, ending the Jewish Revolt
0556 – Pelagius I began his reign as Catholic Pope.
1065 – The Norman Robert Guiscard took Bari. Five centuries of Byzantine rule in southern Italy ended.
1175 – Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor, signed the Treaty of Montebello with the Lombard League.
1245 – Franciscan envoys Giovanni da Pian del Carpine and Benedict to Pole depart Lyon on first Catholic mission to the Mongols. Carpine returns 1247 as first European with account of a Mongolian court
1521 – Martin Luther’s first appearance before the Diet of Worms to be examined by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and the other estates of the empire.
1705 – Queen Anne of England knighted Isaac Newton.
1746 – The Duke of Cumberland defeated Bonnie Prince Charlie (and his Jacobites) at the battle of Culloden.
1797 – Spithead Mutiny begins: British Royal Navy sailors protest over living and working conditions and pay near Portsmouth
1818 – The U.S. Senate ratified Rush-Bagot amendment to form an unarmed U.S.-Canada border.
1861 – US President Abraham Lincoln outlaws business with Confederate States (US Civil War)
1862 – Confederate President Jefferson Davis approved conscription act for white males between 18 and 35.
1883 – Paul Kruger became president of the South African Republic.
1881 – In Dodge City, Kansas, Bat Masterson fights his last gun battle
1905 – Andrew Carnegie donated $10,000,000 of personal money to set up the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
1908 – Natural Bridges National Monument established
1917 – Vladimir Ilyich Lenin returned to Russia to start Bolshevik Revolution after years of exile.
1919 – Mohandas Gandhi organizes a day of “”prayer and fasting”” in response to the British slaughter of Indian protestors in the Amritsar Massacre.
1922 – The Soviet Union and Germany signed the Treaty of Rapallo under which Germany recognized the Soviet Union and diplomatic and trade relations were restored.
1925 – During the Communist St Nedelya Church assault in Sofia, 150 are killed and 500 are wounded
1939 – The Soviet Union proposes an alliance with Britain and France to counter Nazi Germany; the Soviets would later sign a secret agreement with the Nazis
1940 – The first no-hit, no-run game to be thrown on an opening day of the major league baseball season was earned by Bob Feller. The Cleveland Indians beat the Chicago White Sox 1-0.
1942 – The Island of Malta was awarded the George Cross in recognition for heroism under constant German air attack.
1943 – In Basel, Switzerland, chemist Albert Hoffman accidently discovered the the hallucinogenic effects of LSD-25 while working on the medicinal value of lysergic acid.
1944 – The destroyer USS Laffey survived immense damage from attacks by 22 Japanese aircraft off Okinawa.
1945 – American troops entered Nuremberg, Germany.
1947 – In Texas City, TX, the French ship Grandcamp, carrying ammonium nitrate fertilizer, caught fire and blew up. The explosions and resulting fires killed 576 people.
1948 – In Paris, the Organization for European Economic Co-operation was set up.
1951 – 75 people were killed when the British submarine Affray sank in the English Channel.
1962 – Walter Cronkite began anchoring “The CBS Evening News”.
1963 – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. pens his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail while incarcerated in Birmingham, Alabama for protesting against segregation.
1964 – The Rolling Stones release their debut album
1968 – The Pentagon announced that troops would begin coming home from Vietnam.
1972 – Apollo 16 blasted off on a voyage to the moon. It was the fifth manned moon landing.
1975 – The Khmer Rouge Rebels won control of Cambodia after a five years of civil war. They renamed the country Kampuchea and began a reign of terror.
1982 – Queen Elizabeth proclaimed Canada’s new constitution in effect. The act severed the last colonial links with Britain.
1983 – China shelled the Vietnam border in retaliation for raids.
1985 – Mickey Mantle was reinstated after being banned from baseball for several years.
1987 – The U.S. Patent Office began allowing the patenting of new animals created by genetic engineering.
1988 – In Forl, Italy, Red Brigades kill Italian Senator Roberto Ruffilli, an advisor of Prime Minister Ciriaco de Mita
1990 – Supreme Court rejects appeal from retarded man, Dalton Prejean, condemned to death for murdering a Louisiana state trooper in 1977
1992 – The House ethics committee listed 303 current and former lawmakers who had overdrawn their House bank accounts.
1995 – The European Union and Canada agreed to protect threatened fish stocks in the north Atlantic.
1996 – An Italian court found former Prime Minister Bettino Craxi guilty on charges of corruption. He was sentenced to eight years and three months in prison.
2002 – The U.S. Supreme Court overturned major parts of a 1996 child pornography law based on rights to free speech.
2007 – In Blacksburg, VA, a student killed 33 people at Virginia Tech before killing himself.
2012 – The trial of Anders Behring Breivik begins in Oslo- The right-wing extremist had killed 77 people, mostly teenagers, in Oslo with a car bomb and at a youth camp on Utøya island. After doubts about his mental health emerged before the trial, he was sentenced to 21 years in prison.
2013 – 16 people are killed after a gold mine collapses in Kyekyewere, Ghana
2020 – 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment in 4 weeks (5.2 million in the last week), wiping out 9 1/2 years of job gains
2021 – Raúl Castro confirms he is resigning as Cuban Communist Party leader, ending his family’s six decade leadership of Cuba
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
