538 – Witiges, King of the Ostrogoths, ends his siege of Rome, retreats to Ravenna, leaving the city in the hands of victorious Byzantine General Belisarius
1054 – Pope Leo IX escapes captivity & returns to Rome
1350 – Orvieto city says it will behead & burn Jewish-Christian couples
1455 – First record of Johannes Gutenberg’s Bible, letter dated this day by Enea Silvio Piccolomini refers to the bible printed a year before
1496 – Jews are expelled from Syria
1664 – 1st naturalization act in American colonies
1773 – Jeanne Baptiste Pointe de Sable found settlement now known as Chicago
1790 – French Revolution: The National Assembly issues a decree allowing for the sale of church land by French municipalities
1868 – US Congress abolishes manufacturer’s tax
1868 – Henry O’Farrell attempts to assassinate Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, in Sydney, Australia, Duke is shot but survives
1894 – Coca-Cola is sold in bottles for the first time in a candy store in Vicksburg, Mississippi
1912 – Juliette Gordon Low founded the Girl Scouts.
1917 – In the wake of the February Revolution, Communist Party members Joseph Stalin, Lev Kamenev and Matvei Muranov arrive in Petrograd (St Petersburg) and seize control of the Pravda newspaper
1918 – Moscow becomes Russia’s capital city – St. Petersburg lost its status as the Russian capital following the Revolution of 1917, which dismantled the Tsarist autocracy.
1921 – Cairo Conference begins, British meeting to determine Middle Eastern policies, Gertrude Bell and T. E. Lawrence attend
1930 – Mahatma Gandhi embarks on his Salt March – The 240-mile march was an act of civil disobedience to protest the British monopoly on salt. It was one of the most significant events during the Indian independence movement.
1933 – President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave the first of his nation-wide “fireside chats” on radio.
1940 – Finland signs the Moscow Peace Treaty in Moscow, surrendering to Russia and ceding 11% of their pre-WWII territory, ending the “Winter War”
1947 – The Truman doctrine is proclaimed – In his speech before Congress, U.S. President Harry S. Truman defined his foreign relations priorities, which included military and economic support to Turkey and Greece to prevent the spread of communism there. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/truman-doctrine-is-announced
1957 – Random House and Houghton-Mifflin co-publish “The Cat in the Hat” by Dr. Seuss
1971 – Hafez al-Assad consolidates power in Syria by installing himself as President
1977 – Egyptian President Anwar Sadat pledges to regain Arab territory from Israel
1980 – Jury finds John Wayne Gacy guilty of murdering 33 in Chicago
1989 – 2 cyanide-contaminated Chilean grapes found (Philadelphia)
1989 – Computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee submits his first proposal for an “information management system” to his boss at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) who finds it “vague, but exciting”
1993 – 317 killed by bomb attacks in Bombay
1994 – The Church of England ordained women priests for the first time in 460 years.
2002 – The color-coded terror alert system was unveiled by Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge.
2003 – The prime minister of the Serbian state (of Serbia and Montenegro), Zoran Djindjic, was assassinated.
2003 – Elizabeth Smart found after having been missing for 9 months.
2011 – A reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant melts and explodes and releases radioactivity into the atmosphere a day after Japan’s earthquake.
2012 – 45 people, including children, are massacred by the Syrian Army in Homs
2019 – Dozens charged in US college admission scandal by US federal prosecutors, including actresses Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman
2019 – More than 3,000 ISIS fighters have surrendered amid battle for last ISIS stronghold in Baghouz, Syria, according to Syrian Democratic Forces officials
2020 – US President Trump bans travel with 26 European countries, though not the UK, due to COVID-19 (UK and Ireland added a day later)
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
