161 – Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius dies and is succeeded by co-Emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, an unprecedented political arrangement in the Roman Empire
1530 – English King Henry VIII’s divorce request is denied by the Pope
1774 – The British closed the port of Boston to all commerce.
1799 – In Palestine, Napoleon captured Jaffa and his men massacred more than 2,000 Albanian prisoners
1801 – Massachusetts enacts first state voter registration law
1827 – Shrigley Abduction: Ellen Turner, a wealthy heiress in Cheshire, England, is abducted by Edward Gibbon Wakefield, a future politician in colonial New Zealand
1847 – US General Scott occupies Vera Cruz, Mexico
1857 – Baseball decides 9 innings constitutes an official game, not 9 runs
1901 – A grand jury indicted four citizens of Anderson, SC, that had been operating a slavery system in parts of South Carolina. It was determined that many African-Americans were captured while traveling, were jailed and then sent to work for local landowners.
1904 – The Japanese bombed the Russian town of Vladivostok.
1904 – In Springfield, OH, a mob broke into a jail and shot a black man accused of murder.
1908 – Cincinnati’s Mayor Leopold Markbreit announced before the city council that, “Women are not physically fit to operate automobiles.”
1911 – In the wake of the Mexican Revolution, the U.S. sent 20,000 troops to the border of Mexico.
1921 – Red Army under Trotsky attacks sailors of Kronstadt naval base near St Petersburg, Russia
1927 – A Texas law that banned Negroes from voting was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.
1936 – Adolf Hitler broke the Treaty of Versailles and the Locarno Pact when he ordered troops to march into the Rhineland.
1946 – Bikini Atoll islanders are evacuated by the US government to make way for a nuclear testing site
1951 – U.N. forces in Korea under General Matthew Ridgeway launched Operation Ripper against the Chinese.
1962 – Ground-breaking report “Smoking and Health” published by the British Royal College of Physicians, first major report to warn of the dangers of smoking
1965 – State troopers and a sheriff’s posse broke up a march by civil rights demonstrators in Selma, AL. https://www.history.com/news/selma-bloody-sunday-attack-civil-rights-movement
1968 – The Battle of Saigon came to an end.
1971 – A speech by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman helps spark the Bangladesh war of independence
1975 – The U.S. Senate revised the filibuster rule. The new rule allowed 60 senators to limit debate instead of the previous two-thirds.
1981 – Anti-government guerrillas in Colombia executed the kidnapped American Bible translator Chester Allen Bitterman. The guerrillas accused Bitterman of being a CIA agent.
1989 – Poland accused the Soviet Union of a World War II massacre in Katyn.
1991 – Iraq continues to explode oil fields in Kuwait
1994 – The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that parodies that poke fun at an original work can be considered “fair use” that does not require permission from the copyright holder.
2002 – A federal judge awarded Anna Nicole Smith more than $88 million in damages. The ruling was the latest in a legal battle over the estate of Smith’s late husband, J. Howard Marshall II.
2003 – Scientists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center announced that they had transferred 6.7 gigabytes of uncompressed data from Sunnvale, CA, to Amsterdam, Netherlands, in 58 seconds. The data was sent via fiber-optic cables and traveled 6,800 miles.
2009 – NASA’s Kepler Mission, a space photometer for searching for extrasolar planets in the Milky Way galaxy, was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida.
2015 – 54 people are killed & 143 are wounded by 5 Boko Haram suicide bombings in Maiduguri city, Nigeria
2017 – 19 girls killed in a fire at a government-run care center in San José Pinula, Guatemala
2021 – Explosions at a military base in Bata, Equatorial Guinea, likely from faulty storage of dynamite, kills at least 98 and injures over 400
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
