1065 – Westminster Abbey was consecrated under Edward the Confessor.
1612 – First observation of Neptune – Galileo observes and records a “fixed star” without realising it is a planet
1732 – “The Pennsylvania Gazette,” owned by Benjamin Franklin, ran an ad for the first issue of “Poor Richard’s Almanack.”
1832 – John C. Calhoun became the first vice president in U.S. history to resign from office.
1846 – Iowa became the 29th state to be admitted to the Union.
1867 – United States claims Midway Island, the first territory annexed outside Continental limits.
1877 – John Stevens applied for a patent for his flour-rolling mill, which boosted production by 70%.
1917 – The New York Evening Mail published a facetious essay by H.L. Mencken on the history of bathtubs in America.
1921 – The beginning of the Rand Rebellion in Southern Africa; the rebellion started as a strike by white mineworkers on and became an open armed rebellion against the state
1937 – The Irish Free State became the Republic of Ireland when a new constitution established the country as a sovereign state under the name of Eire.
1945 – The U.S. Congress officially recognized the “Pledge of Allegiance.” https://www.va.gov/opa/publications/celebrate/pledge.pdf
1968 – 100,000 attend Miami Pop Festival
1973 – Alexander Solzhenitsyn published “Gulag Archipelago,” an expose of the Soviet prison system.
1973 – US President Nixon signs Endangered Species Act into law
1976 – Winnie Mandela banished in South Africa
1980 – Mexico terminated fishing agreements with US
1982 – Nevell Johnson Jr. was mortally wounded by a police officer in a Miami video arcade. The event set off three days of race related disturbances that left another man dead.
1987 – The bodies of 14 relatives of R. Gene Simmons were found at his home near Dover, AR. Simmons had gone on a shooting spree in Russellville that claimed two other lives.
1995 – Pressure from German prosecutors investigating pornography forced CompuServe to set a precedent by blocking access to sex-oriented newsgroups on the Internet for its customers.
2000 – U.S. District Court Judge Matsch held a hearing to ensure that confessed Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh understood that he was dropping his appeals. McVeigh said that he wanted an execution date, set but wanted to reserve the right to seek presidential clemency.
2000 – U.S. retail giant Montgomery Ward announces it is going out of business after 128 years.
2009 – 43 people die in a suicide bombing in Karachi, Pakistan, where Shia Muslims were observing the Day of Ashura.
2012 – Vladimir Putin signs into law a ban on US adoption of Russian children
2013 – Early signs of Ebola epidemic: 2 year old child in Guinea dies of an unidentified hemorrhagic fever; mother, sister and grandmother soon follow
2019 – Jihadist fundamentalist group al-Shabaab sets off a truck bomb in Mogadishu, Somalia, killing at least 84 people and wounding over 150
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
