1814 – The War of 1812 between the United States and England, British troops enter Washington, D.C. and burn the White House in retaliation for the American attack on the city of York in Ontario, Canada, in June 1813.
0049 BC – Julius Caesar’s general Gaius Curio is defeated in the Second Battle of the Bagradas River by the Numidians under Attius Varus and King Juba of Numidia. Curio commits suicide to avoid capture.
0079 – Mount Vesuvius erupted killing approximately 20,000 people. The cities of Pompeii, Stabiae and Herculaneum were buried in volcanic ash.
0410 – The Visigoths overran Rome. This event symbolized the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
1215 – Pope Innocent III declares Magna Carta invalid.
1349 – Six thousand Jews are killed in Mainz after being blamed for the bubonic plague.
1349 – Jews of Cologne Germany set themselves on fire to avoid baptism
1456 – The printing of the Gutenberg Bible was completed.
1572 – Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre | The Catholics began their slaughter of the French Protestants in Paris. The killings claimed about 70,000 people.
1662 – Act of Uniformity requires England to accept the Book of Common Prayer.
1680 – Death of Colonel (Thomas) Blood, Irish adventurer who stole Crown Jewels from Tower of London in 1671.
1682 – William Penn receives the area that is now the state of Delaware, and adds it to his colony of Pennsylvania.
1690 – Job Charnock establishes an English trading post in West Bengal, considered the official founding of India’s largest city, Calcutta
1751 – Thomas Colley executed in England for drowning supposed witch
1814 – British and Canadian troops invade Washington, D.C. and burn down the White House and several other buildings https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/british-troops-set-fire-to-the-white-house
1816 – The Treaty of St. Louis is signed by the USA and the united tribes of Ottawa, Ojibwa, and Potawatomi in St. Louis, Missouri
1821 – The Treaty of Crdoba is signed in Crdoba, now in Veracruz, Mexico, concluding the Mexican War of Independence from Spain
1853 – The first potato chips prepared by Chef George Crum (Saratoga Springs, NY)
1857 – The Panic of 1857 begins, setting off one of the most severe economic crises in U.S. history.
1858 – In Richmond, Virginia, 90 blacks are arrested for learning
1891 – Thomas Edison applied patents for the kinetoscope and kinetograph (U.S. Pats. 493,426 and 589,168).
1904 – Battle of Liao-Yang-200,000 Japanese against 150,000 Russian, Japanese tactical victory
1912 – A four-pound limit was set for parcels sent through the U.S. Post Office mail system.
1912 – District of Alaska becomes an organized incorporated territory of the United States
1912 – US passes Anti-gag law, federal employees right to petition government
1929 – Riots in Palestine of 1929: 18 Jews in Safed, 67 in Hebron, and 22 in Jerusalem killed by Arab Palestinians
1932 – Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the U.S. non-stop. The trip from Los Angeles, CA to Newark, NJ, took about 19 hours.
1937 – In the Spanish Civil War, the Basque Army surrenders to the Italian Corpo Truppe Volontarie following the Santoa Agreement
1939 – Last man hanged in New South Wales: axe murderer John Trevor Kelly.
1942 – Transport #23 departs with French Jews to nazi-Germany
1949 – The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) went into effect. The agreement was that an attack against on one of the parties would be considered “an attack against them all.”
1954 – US President Eisenhower signs Communist Control Act, outlawing the Communist Party, at height of McCarthyism
1959 – Three days after Hawaiian statehood, Hiram L. Fong was sworn in as the first Chinese-American U.S. senator while Daniel K. Inouye was sworn in as the first Japanese-American U.S. representative.
1961 – Former nazi leader Johannes Vorster becomes South Africa’s minister of justice
1967 – Led by Abbie Hoffman, a group of hippies temporarily disrupt trading at the NYSE by throwing dollar bills from the viewing gallery, causing a cease in trading as the brokers scramble to grab them up
1967 – Liberia adopts national flag designed and hand-stitched by a committee of seven women chaired by Susannah Elizabeth Lewis; all of the women were born in the US
1968 – France became the 5th thermonuclear power when they exploded a hydrogen bomb in the South Pacific.
1970 – Bomb kills 1 at U of Wisconsin’s Army Math Research Center in Madison
1975 – Royal Commission in Australia finds women in public service work in poor conditions and are underpaid and had limited promotion prospect
1981 – Mark David Chapman, convicted assassin of ex-Beatle John Lennon, is sentenced in New York to 20-years-to-life in prison.
1985 – 27 anti-apartheid leaders were arrested in South Africa as racial violence rocked the country.
1986 – Frontier Airlines shut down. Thousands of people were left stranded.
1989 – Pete Rose, the manager of the Cincinnati Reds, was banned from baseball for life after being accused of gambling on baseball.
1989 – “Total war” was declared by Columbian drug lords on their government.
1989 – The U.S. space probe, Voyager 2, sent back photographs of Neptune.
1990 – MA judge rules that Judas Priest are not responsible for the deaths of two youths who committed suicide after listening to the band’s music.
1990 – Iraqi troops surrounded foreign missions in Kuwait.
1991 – Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as the head of the Communist Party.
1992 – China and South Korea established diplomatic relations.
1998 – U.S. officials cited a soil sample as part of the evidence that a Sudan plant was producing precursors to the VX nerve gas. And, therefore made it a target for U.S. missiles on August 20, 1998.
1998 – A donation of 24 beads was made, from three parties, to the Indian Museum of North America at the Crazy Horse Memorial. The beads are said to be those that were used in 1626 to buy Manhattan from the Indians.
2001 – In McAllen, TX, Bridgestone/Firestone agreed to settle out of court and pay a reported $7.5 million to a family in a rollover accident in their Ford Explorer.
2001 – The remains of nine American servicemen killed in the Korean War were returned to the U.S. The bodies were found about 60 miles north of Pyongyang. It was estimated that it would be a year before the identies of the soldiers would be known.
2006 – The planet Pluto was reclassified as a “dwarf planet” by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Pluto’s status was changed due to the IAU’s new rules for an object qualifying as a planet. Pluto met two of the three rules because it orbits the sun and is large enough to assume a nearly round shape. However, since Pluto has an oblong orbit and overlaps the orbit of Neptune it disqualified Pluto as a planet.
2012 – A US jury in California finds that Samsung is guilty of patent infringement and awards over US$1 billion in damages to Apple meanwhile in a South Korea court both are found guilty of patent infringement
2013 – 30 people are killed in a gang battle involving flame throwers in Palmasola prison, Bolivia
2014 – Nurse William Pooley flies back to the UK for emergency treatment after contracting Ebola virus after attempting to treat patients in Sierra Leone
2016 – Astronomers announce discovery of earth-like planet named Proxima b orbiting star Proxima Centauri
2019 – Britain’s Prince Andrew denies knowing his friend Jeffrey Epstein was involved in sexual trafficking of underage girls after public accusations made against him
2019 – US adventurer Victor Vescovo is the first person to visit the deepest point of every ocean when he reaches Molloy Hole, in the Arctic
2021 – UN says Madagascar on brink of world’s first “climate change famine” with people suffering “catastrophic” levels of hunger, after four years without rain
2022 – US President Biden announces plan to cancel student loan debts by $10,000 (for those earning less than $125,000) and $20,000 for those who had received Pell grants
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
