1973 – Future US senator John McCain is released after spending over five years in a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp
1369 – Battle of Montiel: Peter of Castile (Peter the Cruel) with support from England is defeated by an alliance between the French and his half-brother Henry II
1489 – Catherine Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus, sold her kingdom to Venice. She was the last of the Lusignan dynasty.
1590 – Battle of Ivry: French King Henry IV beats Catholic League during French Wars of Religion
1592 – “Ultimate Pi day”: on this day at 6.53am is the largest correspondence between calendar dates and significant digits of pi, since the introduction of the Julian calendar (3.14159265358)
1629 – A Royal charter was granted to the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
1644 – England grants patent for Providence Plantations (now Rhode Island)
1647 – During the Thirty Years War, France, Sweden, Bavaria and Cologne signed a Treaty of Neutrality.
1689 – Scotland dismisses William III & Mary Stuart as king & queen
1743 – First American town meeting was held at Boston’s Faneuil Hall.
1757 – British Admiral John Byng was executed by a firing squad on board HMS Monarch for neglect of duty.
1858 – Ellen G. White receives a vision while attending a funeral service in Lovett’s Grove, near Bowling Green, Ohio
1864 – Samuel Baker discovered another source of the Nile in East Africa. He named it Lake Albert Nyanza.
1891 – The submarine Monarch laid telephone cable along the bottom of the English Channel to prepare for the first telephone links across the Channel.
1900 – U.S. currency went on the gold standard with the ratification of the Gold Standard Act.
1900 – In Holland, Botanist Hugo de Vries rediscovered Mendel’s laws of heredity.
1901 – Utah Governor Heber M. Wells vetoed a bill that would have relaxed restrictions on polygamy.
1903 – The U.S. Senate ratified the Hay-Herran Treaty that guaranteed the U.S. the right to build a canal at Panama. The Columbian Senate rejected the treaty. A deal was signed on November 6, 1903 with the newly independent Panama.
1904 – The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the governments claim that the Northern Securities Company was an illegal merger between the Great Northern and Northern Pacific Railway companies.
1910 – The Lakeview Gusher causes the largest accidental oil spill in history, The spill lasted 18 months and 9 million barrels of crude oil were released.
1912 – An anarchist named Antonio Dalba unsuccessfully attempted to kill Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III in Rome.
1914 – Henry Ford announced the new continuous motion method to assemble cars. The process decreased the time to make a car from 12½ hours to 93 minutes.
1915 – The British Navy sank the German battleship Dresden off the Chilean coast.
1918 – An all-Russian Congress of Soviets ratified a peace treaty with the Central Powers.
1923 – President Harding became the first U.S. President to file an income tax report.
1932 – George Eastman, the founder of the Kodak company, committed suicide.
1936 – Adolf Hitler told a crowd of 300,000 that Germany’s only judge is God and itself.
1937 – Battle of the Century: Fred Allen & Jack Benny meet on radio during their “feud”
1939 – Hungary occupied the Carpatho-Ukraine. Slovakia declared its independence.
1939 – The Nazis dissolve the republic of Czechoslovakia.
1942 – For the first time in history, a dying patient’s life is saved by penicillin, Although some claim that the pioneering trials at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, England resulted in the first cures using penicillin, Orvan Hess and John Bumstead are generally credited with the first documented successful treatment.
1945 – In Germany, a 22,000 pound “Grand Slam” bomb was dropped by the Royal Air Force Dumbuster Squad on the Beilefeld railway viaduct. It was the heaviest bomb used during World War II.
1947 – The U.S. signed a 99-year lease on naval bases in the Philippines.
1947 – Moscow announced that 890,532 German POWs were held in the U.S.S.R.
1951 – U.N. forces recaptured Seoul for the second time during the Korean War.
1954 – The Viet Minh launch an assault against the French Colonial Forces at Dien Bien Phu.
1955 – Prince Mahemdra becomes king of Nepal
1958 – The U.S. government suspended arms shipments to the Batista government of Cuba.
1960 – The leaders of Germany and Israel confer for the first time, 15 years after the end of World War II, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion met at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York
1964 – A Dallas jury found Jack Ruby guilty of the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald.
1967 – John F. Kennedy’s body was moved from a temporary grave to a permanent one.
1968 – CBS TV suspends Radio Free Europe free advertising because RFE doesn’t make it clear it is sponsored by the CIA
1973 – Future US senator John McCain is released after spending over five years in a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp
1976 – Egypt formally abrogated the 1971 Treaty Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union.
1978 – An Israeli force of 22,000 invaded south Lebanon. The PLO bases were hit.
1979 – The Census Bureau reported that 95% of all Americans were married or would get married.
1980 – A Polish airliner crashed while making an emergency landing near Warsaw. 87 people were killed. A 14-man U.S. boxing team was aboard the plane.
1981 – Three Pakistani airline hijackers surrendered in Syria after they had exchanged 100 passengers and crewmen for 54 Pakistani prisoners.
1983 – OPEC agreed to cut its oil prices by 15% for the first time in its 23-year history.
1984 – Gerry Adams, head of Sinn Féin, is seriously wounded in an assassination attempt in central Belfast
1989 – Imported assault guns were banned in the U.S. under President George H.W. Bush.
1991 – The “Birmingham Six,” imprisoned for 16 years for their alleged part in an IRA pub bombing, were set free after a court agreed that the police fabricated evidence.
1991 – Bolivian interior minister Guillermo Capobianco resigned after U.S. officials accused him of receiving money from drug traffickers.
1994 – Mexican banker and billionaire Alfredo Harp Helu kidnapped
1995 – American astronaut Norman Thagard became the first American to enter space aboard a Russian rocket.
1996 – U.S. President Bill Clinton committed $100 million for an anti-terrorism pact with Israel to track down and root out Islamic militants.
2002 – A Scottish appeals court upheld the conviction of a Libyan intelligence agent for the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103. A five-judge court ruled unanimously that Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi was guilty of bringing down the plane over Lockerbie, Scotland.
2005 – Cedar Revolution, where over a million Lebanese march in the streets of Beirut to demonstrate against the Syrian military presence in Lebanon, and against the government, following the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
2013 – 25 people are killed and 50 are wounded by a series of car bombings in Baghdad, Iraq
2013 – 7 people are killed after gunmen storm a bar in Cancun, Mexico
2016 – President Putin orders Russian troops out of Syria
2017 – European Court of Justice rules companies can ban staff from wearing religious symbols, including headscarves
2017 – World’s oldest golf club Muirfield in Scotland, votes to admit women as members for 1st time in 273 years
2018 – Brazilian human rights politician Marielle Franco is murdered in Rio, prompting mass protests
2019 – California officially free of drought for the first time in more than 7 years
2019 – US Senate passes resolution overturning President Donald Trump’s national emergency declaration
2021 – UK police officer charged with the death of Sarah Everard, who disappeared walking home in south London, and whose death sparked debate about violence against women
2022 – Civilians able to leave heavily bombed Ukranian city of Mariupol for the first time, amid dead toll of 2,500 in the city and a humanitarian crisis
2022 – Omicron causes the largest outbreak of COVID-19 in China since Wuhan 2020 with 26 million people under lockdown in Changchun and Shenzhen
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
