1497 – John Cabot’s expedition departs Bristol searching for new lands across the Atlantic
1536 – Anne Boleyn is arrested and taken to the Tower of London
1670 – The Hudson Bay Company was founded by England’s King Charles II.
1776 – France and Spain agreed to donate arms to American rebels fighting the British.
1798 – The black General Toussaint L’ouverture forced British troops to agree to evacuate the port of Santo Domingo.
1808 – The citizens of Madrid rose up against Napoleon.
1833 – Russian Tsar Nicolas I bans public sale of serfs
1863 – Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson was wounded by his own men in the battle of Chancellorsville, VA. He died 8 days later.
1865 – U.S. President Andrew Johnson offered $100,000 reward for the capture of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
1885 – The Congo Free State was established by King Leopold II of Belgium.
1890 – Territory of Oklahoma created
1902 – “A Trip to the Moon,” the first science fiction film was released. It was created by magician George Melies.
1918 – General Motors acquires the Chevrolet Motor Company of Delaware.
1927 – U.S. Supreme Court’s “Buck v. Bell”, permits forced sterilizations of various “unfits” by states’ authorities where such surgeries are practiced for eugenic reasons
1933 – Hitler banned trade unions in Germany.
1941 – The Federal Communications Commission agreed to let regular scheduling of TV broadcasts by commercial TV stations begin on July 1, 1941. This was the start of network television.
1945 – Russians took Berlin after 12 days of fierce house-to-house fighting. The Allies announced the surrender of Nazi troops in Italy and parts of Austria.
1957 – Gangster Frank Costello escapes an assassination attempt made by rival mobsters
1960 – Caryl Chessman was executed. He was a convicted sex offender and had become a best selling author while on death row.
1963 – Children’s crusade begins in Birmingham, Alabama. More than 600 African American school children arrested for marching against segregation, organised by James Bevel and the SCLC
1970 – Student anti-war protesters at Ohio’s Kent State University burn down the campus ROTC building. The National Guard took control of the campus.
1974 – Six Catholic civilians killed and eighteen wounded when the UVF explode a bomb at Rose & Crown Bar on Ormeau Road, Belfast
1989 – The Iron Curtain begins to crumble as Hungary dismantles its border fence – By gradually opening its border to Austria, Hungary facilitated the escape of hundreds of East Germans in the months before the Berlin Wall fell.
1994 – Dr Kervokian found innocent on assisting suicides
1997 – Tony Blair becomes British Prime Minister, ending 18 years of Conservative Party reign – Blair’s Labor Party achieved a landslide victory in the general elections. Many of his early fans were bitterly disappointed when he supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 200
2011 – Osama bin Laden is killed by a U.S. commando – Bin Laden was the founder of al-Qaeda, a militant group that claimed responsibility for a series of terrorist attacks on U.S. targets on September 11, 2001.
2011 – The 2011 E. coli O104:H4 outbreak strikes Europe, mostly in Germany, leaving more than 30 people dead and many others sick from the bacteria outbreak.
2013 – Rhode Island becomes the tenth US state to legalize same-sex marriage
2018 – E. coli outbreak linked to Romaine lettuce grown in Yuma, Arizona, reports the first fatality with 121 cases across 25 US states
2018 – Iowa passes US’s strictest abortion ban, based on a fetal heartbeat
2019 – Facebook bans Alex Jones (InfoWars), Milo Yiannopoulos (ex-Breitbart), Louis Farrakhan (Nation of Islam), Paul Nehlen and Laura Loomer for hate speech
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
