1865 – Columbia, SC, burned. The Confederates were evacuating, and the Union Forces were moving in.
1461 – Wars of the Roses: Second Battle of St Albans – Lancastrian army defeats Yorkists and recaptures King Henry VI
1510 – Portuguese admiral Afonso de Albuquerque first conquers the city of Goa, entering it with little conflict
1568 – Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II agrees to pay tribute to the Ottoman Empire for peace
1600 – Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno is burned alive at Campo de’ Fiori in Rome, convicted of heresy by the Roman Inquisition
1772 – 1st Partition of Poland signed in Vienna by Austria, Prussia and Russia
1776 – 1st volume of Edward Gibbon’s seminal work “The Decline and Fall of Roman Empire” published
1801 – The U.S. House of Representatives broke an electoral tie between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr. Jefferson was elected president and Burr became vice president.
1815 – Treaty of Ghent ratified by the US Senate and signed by President James Madison ending War of 1812, over a month after it was signed in Europe
1854 – Britain recognizes independence of Orange Free State (South Africa)
1863 – A precursor of the Red Cross and Red Crescent is founded, The “Committee for Relief to the Wounded” was created by a group of citizens in Geneva, Switzerland.
1864 – The Confederate submarine Hunley sinks the USS Housatonic in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina.
1865 – Columbia, SC, burned. The Confederates were evacuating, and the Union Forces were moving in.
1876 – Julius Wolff was credited with being the first to can sardines.
1880 – Alexander II of Russia survives an assassination attempt
1897 – The National Congress of Mothers was organized in Washington, DC, by Alice McLellan Birney and Phoebe Apperson Hearst. It was the forerunner of the National PTA.
1902 – A general strike in Barcelona and nearby towns leads to government-troop reprisals that leave 40 dead
1909 – Apache chief Geronimo dies of pneumonia at age 80, while still in captivity at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
1925 – The first issue of Harold Ross’ magazine, The New Yorker, hits the stands, selling for 15 cents a copy.
1933 – “Newsweek” was first published.
1933 – Blondie Boopadoop married Dagwood Bumstead three years after Chic Young’s popular strip first debuted.
1934 – The first high school automobile driver’s education course was introduced in State College, PA.
1935 – Thirty-one prisoners escape an Oklahoma prison after murdering a guard.
1936 – The world’s first superhero, The Phantom, a cartoon strip by Lee Falk, makes his first appearance in comics
1940 – Altmark Incident: Crew of the British destroyer “Cossack” board German “Altmark” in Jøssingfjord, Norway, releasing 299 British prisoners after hand-to-hand fighting with bayonets and the last recorded Royal Naval action with cutlass
1944 – During World War II, the Battle of Eniwetok Atoll began. U.S. forces won the battle on February 22, 1944.
1947 – The Voice of America began broadcasting to the Soviet Union.
1963 – Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev visits the Berlin Wall.
1964 – The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that congressional districts within each state had to be approximately equal in population. (Westberry v. Sanders)
1969 – Russia and Peru sign their first trade accord.
1970 – US army officer Jeffrey MacDonald murders his pregnant wife and two small daughters
1972 – Sales of the Volkswagen Beetle model exceed those of Ford Model T
1974 – Robert K. Preston, a disgruntled U.S. Army private, buzzes the White House with a stolen helicopter.
1978 – 11 civilians and 1 RUC officer are killed and 30 wounded by a Provisional Irish Republican Army incendiary bomb at the La Mon Restaurant near Belfast
1979 – China begins a “pedagogical” war against Vietnam. It will last until March.
1981 – Chrysler Corporation reports largest corporate losses in US history
1986 – Johnson & Johnson announces it will no longer sell capsule drugs
1986 – Libyan bombers attack N’djamena Airport in Chad
1992 – In Milwaukee, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was sentenced to life in prison. In November of 1994, he was beaten to death in prison.
1995 – Colin Ferguson was convicted of six counts of murder in the December 1993 Long Island Rail Road shootings. He was later sentenced to a minimum of 200 years in prison.
1997 – Pepperdine University announced that Kenneth Starr was leaving the Whitewater probe to take a full-time job at the school. Starr reversed the announcement four days later.
2005 – U.S. President George W. Bush named John Negroponte as the first national intelligence director.
2008 – Kosovo declares its independence, The region’s secession from Serbia followed an armed conflict referred to as the Kosovo War.
2012 – The President of Germany, Christian Wulff, resigns over a corruption scandal
2013 – 37 people are killed and 130 are injured in a series of Baghdad car bombings
2016 – Car bomb attack on military convoy in Ankara, Turkey, by Kurdish militant eaves 28 dead
2016 – Chief executive Tim Cook confirms Apple will contest an FBI order to unlock the phone of San Bernardino gunman Syed Rizwan Farook
2017 – Discovery of a new mostly underwater continent Zealandia in the South Pacific announced in research journal “GSA Today”
2019 – Protests continue by thousands in streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, against government corruption and inflation
2022 – 28,000 women apply for 30 jobs driving trains after they are advertised for women in Saudi Arabia for the first time
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
