1962 – Marilyn Monroe performed a sultry rendition of “Happy Birthday” for U.S. President John F. Kennedy. The event was a fund-raiser at New York’s Madison Square Garden.
1182 – The high altar of Paris cathedral Notre Dame is consecrated by Cardinal Henri de Château-Marçay and Maurice de Sully
1535 – French explorer Jacques Cartier set sail for North America.
1536 – Anne Boleyn, the second wife of England’s King Henry VIII, was beheaded after she was convicted of adultery.
1568 – After being defeated by the Protestants, Mary the Queen of Scots, fled to England where she was imprisoned by Queen Elizabeth.
1608 – The Protestant states formed the Evangelical Union of Lutherans and Calvinists.
1643 – The colonies of Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut, and New Harbor met to form the New England Confederation.
1649 – England is declared a Commonwealth by an act of the Rump Parliament making England a republic for the next 11 years
1743 – Jean-Pierre Christin invents the Celsius thermometer
1796 – The first U.S. game law was approved. The measure called for penalties for hunting or destroying game within Indian territory.
1828 – U.S. President John Quincy Adams signs the Tariff of 1828/Tariff of Abominations into law to protect industry in the North
1857 – The electric fire alarm system was patented by William F. Channing and Moses G. Farmer.
1858 – A pro-slavery band led by Charles Hameton executed unarmed Free State men near Marais des Cygnes on the Kansas-Missouri border.
1864 – The Union and Confederate armies launched their last attacks against each other at Spotsylvania in Virginia.
1883 – William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody opened Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in Omaha, Nebraska
1898 – US Congress passes the Private Mailing Card Act, allowing private publishers and printers to produce postcards, had to be labelled “Private Mailing Cards” until 1901, known as “souvenir cards”
1911 – The first American criminal conviction that was based on fingerprint evidence occurred in New York City.
1921 – The U.S. Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, which established national quotas for immigrants.
1926 – Benito Mussolini announced that democracy was deceased. Rome became a fascist state.
1926 – In Damascus, Syria, French shells killed 600 people.
1935 – English Cardinal John Fisher and statesman Thomas More, executed by Henry VIII, canonized as saints by Pope Pius XI
1944 – 240 gypsies transported to Auschwitz from Westerbork, Netherlands, including Sinti girl Settela Steinbach famously filmed by Jewish photographer Rudolf Breslauer
1954 – Postmaster General Summerfield approves CIA mail-opening project
1959 – The North Vietnamese Army begins organizing the Ho Chi Minh trail, According to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), the system of supply routes used by the “Vietcong” was “one of the greatest achievements of military engineering of the 20th century.”
1962 – Marilyn Monroe performed a sultry rendition of “Happy Birthday” for U.S. President John F. Kennedy. The event was a fund-raiser at New York’s Madison Square Garden. https://www.history.com/news/marilyn-monroe-happy-birthday-mr-president-jfk
1963 – Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail is published, King used the open letter to defend his nonviolent resistance against racism and segregation. It became one of the central texts for the civil rights movement in the United States.
1964 – The U.S. State Department reported that diplomats had found about 40 microphones planted in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.
1971 – USSR launches Mars 2, becomes the 1st spacecraft to crash land on Mars
1981 – 5 British Army soldiers are killed when their armoured vehicle is ripped apart by a Provisional Irish Republican Army roadside bomb near Bessbrook, County Armagh
1988 – In Jacksonville, FL, Carlos Lehder Rivas was convicted of smuggling more than three tons of cocaine into the United States. Rivas was the co-founder of Colombia’s Medellin drug cartel.
1992 – U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle criticized the CBS sitcom “Murphy Brown” for having its title character decide to bear a child out of wedlock.
1992 – The 27th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution went into effect. The amendment prohibits Congress from giving itself midterm pay raises.
2003 – It was announced that Worldcom Inc. would pay investors $500 million to settle civil fraud charges over its $11 billion accounting scandal.
2003 – Hundreds of Albert Einstein’s scientific papers, personal letters and humanist essays were make available on the Internet. Einstein had given the papers to the Hebrew Universtiy of Jerusalem in his will.
2009 – Sri Lanka announces victory in its 25-year war against the terrorist organization, Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
2011 – Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, project to search for dark matter, led by Samuel C. C. Ting, installed on the International Space Station
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
