1541 – Ignatius of Loyola became the first superior-general of the Jesuits.
1581 – Francis Drake was knighted by Queen Elizabeth I. A few months earlier he became the first Englishman to circumnavigate the world.
1687 – King James II ordered that his declaration of indulgence be read in church.
1789 – 1st US Congress begins regular sessions during George Washington’s presidency at Federal Hall, NYC (ending 1791)
1812 – The territory of Orleans became the 18th U.S. state and will become known as Louisiana.
1818 – A plan was passsed by the U.S. Congress that the U.S. flag would have 13 red and white stripes and 20 stars and that a new star would be added for the each new state.
1841 – U.S. President William Henry Harrison, at the age of 68, became the first president to die in office. He had been sworn in only a month before he died of pneumonia.
1866 – Alexander II of Russia narrowly escapes an assassination attempt by Dmitry Karakozov in the city of St. Petersburg
1900 – Assassination attempt on Prince of Wales, later British King Edward VII when shot by Jean-Baptiste Sipido in protest over Boer war
1905 – In Kangra, India, an earthquake killed 370,000 people.
1932 – After five years of research, professor C.G. King, of the University of Pittsburgh, isolated vitamin C.
1939 – Faisal II ascends to throne of Iraq
1945 – World War II: Soviet forces liberate Hungary from German occupation, establishing their own communist satellite state. This was celebrated as Liberation Day until 1989.
1945 – The Holocaust: US forces liberate the Ohrdruf concentration camp in Germany, the first such camp to be liberated by the US Army
1949 – NATO is formed – 12 nations signed the North Atlantic Treaty to establish what is today one of the world’s most important military alliances.
1953 – Fifteen doctors were released by Soviet leaders. The doctors had been arrested before Stalin had died and were accused of plotting against him.
1968 – Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated – The civil rights activist was killed by James Earl Ray. Ray, a segregationist, received a 99-year prison sentence. He died in jail in 1998.
1968 – Riots break out in over 100 cities in the United States following the assassination of African-American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr.
1975 – Bill Gates and Paul Allen establish Microsoft – Microsoft has developed into a multinational corporation, and it is the world’s largest software maker by revenue.
1975 – More than 130 people, most of them children, were killed when a U.S. Air Force transport plane evacuating Vietnamese orphans crashed just after takeoff from Saigon.
1979 – Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is executed – The former President of Pakistan had been deposed by a coup d’etat. He was hanged despite international calls to stop the execution.
1984 – Winston Smith in Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” begins his secret diary in defiance of the totalitarian government of Oceania
1987 – The U.S. charged the Soviet Union with wiretapping a U.S. Embassy.
1988 – Arizona Governor Evan Mecham was voted out of office by the Arizona Senate. Mecham was found guilty of diverting state funds to his auto business and of trying to impede an investigation into a death threat to a grand jury witness.
1991 – Pennsylvanian Senator John Heinz and six others were killed when a helicopter collided with Heinz’s plane over a schoolyard in Merion, PA.
2008 – Raid on Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints owned YFZ Ranch in Texas; 401 children and 133 women taken into state custody
2012 – Somalia’s National Theater is struck by a suicide bomber killing ten people including the presidents of the Somali Olympic Committee and Football Federation
2019 – US Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints pledges to roll back anti-LGBT policies, including not baptizing children of gay parents
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
