1506 – Construction of the current St. Peter’s Basilica begins – St. Peter’s in Vatican City is one of the world’s most important Catholic sites.
1521 – Martin Luther confronted the emperor Charles V in the Diet of Worms and refused to retract his views that led to his excommunication.
1676 – Sudbury, Massachusetts, was attacked by Indians.
1688 – “Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery”: Francis Daniel Pastorius presents 1st formal written protest against African-American slavery in English colonies in Germantown, Pennsylvania
1775 – American revolutionaries Paul Revere, William Dawes and Samuel Prescott rode though the towns of Massachusetts giving the warning that the Regulars were coming out. Later, the phrase “the British are coming” was attributed to Revere even though it is unlikely he used that wording.
1791 – National Guardsmen prevented Louis XVI and his family from leaving Paris.
1818 – A regiment of Indians and blacks were defeated at the Battle of Suwann, in Florida, ending the first Seminole War.
1847 – U.S. troops defeated almost 17,000 Mexican soldiers commanded by Santa Anna at Cerro Gordo. (Mexican-American War)
1861 – Colonel Robert E. Lee turned down an offer to command the Union armies during the U.S. Civil War.
1877 – Charles Cros wrote a paper that described the process of recording and reproducing sound. In France, Cros is regarded as the inventor of the phonograph. In the U.S., Thomas Edison gets the credit.
1906 – The Los Angeles Times story on the Azusa Street Revival launches Pentecostalism as a worldwide movement
1906 – San Francisco, CA, was hit with an earthquake. The original death toll was cited at about 700. Later information indicated that the death toll may have been 3 to 4 times the original estimate.
1938 – Headless Mad Butcher victim found in Cleveland
1942 – James H. Doolittle and his squadron, from the USS Hornet, raided Tokyo and other Japanese cities.
1945 – Clandestine Radio 1212, after broadcasting pro-nazi propaganda for months used their influence to trap 350,000 German army group B troops
1946 – The League of Nations was dissolved.
1949 – The Republic of Ireland was established.
1951 – The European Coal and Steel Community, a precursor of the European Union, is established – The Treaty of Paris was signed by France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
1958 – A United States federal court rules that poet Ezra Pound is to be released from an insane asylum.
1968 – London Bridge was sold to an American. It was rebuilt in Arizona.
1973 – US Government ends Mandatory Oil Import Program, established in 1959 by President Eisenhower – In 1959, the U.S. government established the Mandatory Oil Import Quota program (MOIP), which restricted the amount of imported crude oil and refined products allowed into the United States and gave preferential treatment to oil imports from Canada, Mexico, and, somewhat later, Venezuela.
1978 – The U.S. Senate approved the transfer of the Panama Canal to Panama on December 31, 1999.
1983 – The U.S. Embassy in Beirut was blown up by a suicide car-bomber. 63 people were killed including 17 Americans
1989 – Thousands of Chinese students demanding democracy tried to storm Communist Party headquarters in Beijing.
1990 – Supreme Court rules states could make it a crime to possess or look at child pornography, even in one’s home
1991 – US Census Bureau said it failed to count up to 63 million in 1990 census
1996 – In Lebanon, at least 106 civilians are killed when the Israel Defense Forces accidentally shell the UN compound at Quana.
2002 – Afghanistan’s former king, Mohammad Zahir Shah, returned after 29 years in exile.
2007 – The Supreme Court of the United States upholds the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act in a 5-4 decision
2020 – Canada’s worst modern mass shooting as a gunman kills 18 people, including a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer, across Nova Scotia
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
