1955 – Rosa Parks, a black seamstress in Montgomery, AL, refused to give up her seat to a white man. Mrs. Parks was arrested marking a milestone in the civil rights movement in the U.S.
800 – Charlemagne judges the accusations against Pope Leo III in the Vatican.
1420 – Henry V of England enters Paris
1626 – Pasha Muhammad ibn Farukh, tyrannical governor of Jerusalem, driven out
1640 – Portugal regains independence after 60 years of Spanish rule following a revolution by Portuguese nobility; the Portuguese Restoration War begins and lasts until 1668 with recognition by Spain of the country’s independence
1641 – Massachusetts becomes the first colony to give statutory recognition to slavery
1742 – Empress Elisabeth orders expulsion of all Jews from Russia
1768 – The slave ship Fredensborg sinks off Tromøy in Norway (rediscovered 1974)
1824 – US House of Representatives begins to decide outcome of election deadlock between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson (Adams wins)
1835 – Hans Christian Andersen published his first book of fairy tales.
1884 – American Old West: Near Frisco, New Mexico, deputy sheriff Elfego Baca holds off a gang of 80 Texan cowboys who want to kill him for arresting Charles McCarthy.
1896 – 1st certified public accountants receive certificates (NY)
1909 – The Pennsylvania Trust Company, of Carlisle, PA, became the first bank in the in the U.S. to offer a Christmas Club account.
1913 – Ford Motor Co. began using a new movable assembly line that ushered in the era of mass production.
1913 – The first drive-in automobile service station opened, in Pittsburgh, PA.
1915 – The US requests that Germany withdraw its military and naval attaches from the Embassy in Washington
1918 – The Kingdom of Iceland was established with the signing of the Act of Union with Denmark. The act recognized Iceland as a sovereign state under a common monarch with Denmark, and the Kingdom lasted until 1944 when a national referendum created the Republic of Iceland.
1919 – Lady Astor was sworn in as the first female member of the British Parliament.
1925 – The Locarno Pact finalized the treaties between World War I protagonists.
1934 – Leningrad mayor Sergey Kirov is assassinated, Joseph Stalin uses it as an excuse to begin his Great Purge of 1934-38
1939 – SS-Fuhrer Himmler begins deportation of Polish Jews
1941 – In the U.S., the Civil Air Patrol was created. In April 1943 the Civil Air Patrol was placed under the jurisdiction of the Army Air Forces.
1942 – In the U.S., nationwide gasoline rationing went into effect.
1943 – At the end of the Tehran Conference, the Big Three (Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt) agree that the invasion of Normandy should take place in May 1944
1952 – In Denmark, it was announced that the first successful sex-change operation had been performed.
1953 – Hugh Hefner publishes 1st edition of Playboy magazine, featuring Marilyn Monroe as the magazine’s 1st centerfold
1955 – Rosa Parks, a black seamstress in Montgomery, AL, refused to give up her seat to a white man. Mrs. Parks was arrested marking a milestone in the civil rights movement in the U.S.
1959 – 12 countries, including the U.S. and USSR, signed a treaty that set aside Antarctica as a scientific preserve, which would be free from military activity.
1963 – Wendell Scott wins the Grand National Series Jacksonville 200 at Speedway Park in Jacksonville, Florida, becoming the first black driver to win a race at NASCAR’s premier level
1965 – An airlift of refugees from Cuba to the United States began.
1969 – The U.S. government held its first draft lottery since World War II.
1971 – Cambodian Civil War: Khmer Rouge rebels intensify assaults on Cambodian government positions, forcing their retreat from Kompong Thmar and nearby Ba Ray.
1974 – LA Skid Row slasher kills 1st of 8
1975 – US President Gerald Ford visits People’s Republic of China
1976 – Sex Pistols using profanity on TV, gets them branded as “rotten punks”
1978 – US President Jimmy Carter more than doubles national park system size
1986 – U.S. President Ronald Reagan said he would welcome an investigation of the Iran-Contra affair if it were recommended by the Justice Department.
1989 – Dissidents in the Philippine military launched an unsuccessful coup against Corazon Aquino’s government.
1989 – East Germany’s Parliament abolished the Communist Party’s constitutional guarantee of supremacy.
1990 – British and French workers digging the Channel Tunnel finally met under the English Channel.
1991 – Ukrainians voted overwhelmingly for independence from the Soviet Union.
1992 – Russian President Boris Yeltsin survived an impeachment attempt by hard-liners at the opening of the Russian Congress.
1994 – Jim Bakker, American televangelist and convicted fraud is released from jail
2008 – The US economy has been in recession since December 2007, the National Bureau of Economic Research announces today
2009 – The Treaty of Lisbon, which amended the two treaties – the Maastricht Treaty and the Treaty of Rome – that form the constitutional basis of the European Union came into force after being signed by 13 countries in 2007.
2016 – Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn is declared King of Thailand, succeeding his father King Bhumibol Adulyadej
2016 – Gambia presidential election: dictator Yahya Jammeh is defeated by Adama Barrow after 22 years in power
2016 – UN admits its peacekeepers were responsible for the cholera epidemic in Haiti in 2010 that killed 30,000
2017 – President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn pleads guilty to lying to the F.B.I.
2018 – Syrian shadow puppetry added to UN list of cultural activities in urgent need of saving
2018 – Violent demonstrations in Paris, France, by yellow-vest movement with 36,000 protesting nationwide
2019 – Earliest traceable patient, a 55-year-old man, develops symptoms of a novel coronavirus (Covid-19) in Wuhan, China
2021 – Tel Aviv named the world’s most expensive city for the first time ahead of Singapore and Paris, with Damascus the cheapest
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
