1961 – A white mob attacked the Freedom Riders in Montgomery, AL. The event prompted the federal government to send U.S. marshals.
325 – The First Council of Nicaea the first Ecumenical Council of the Christian Church is held was inaugurated by Emperor Constantine
1217 – The Second Battle of Lincoln is fought near Lincoln, England, resulting in the defeat of Prince Louis of France by William Marshal, 2nd Earl of Pembroke.
1303 – Treaty of Paris restores Gascony to the English and arranges marriage of English Prince Edward to French Princess Isabella
1310 – Shoes were made for both right & left feet
1498 – Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama arrives at Calicut, India becoming the first European to reach India by sea
1506 – In Spain, Christopher Columbus died in poverty.
1520 – Hernando Cortez defeated Spanish troops that had been sent to punish him in Mexico.
1521 – Battle of Pampeluna: Ignatius Loyola seriously wounded in the battle by a cannonball
1570 – Cartographer Abraham Ortelius issues the first modern atlas.
1631 – The city of Magdeburg in Germany is seized by forces of the Holy Roman Empire and most of its inhabitants massacred, in one of the bloodiest incidents of the Thirty Years’ War.
1639 – Dorchester, Massachusetts funds the first school in the US from local taxes
1690 – England passed the Act of Grace, forgiving followers of James II.
1674 – John Sobieski became Poland’s first King.
1704 – Elias Neau forms school for slaves in New York
1774 – Britain’s Parliament passed the Coercive Acts to punish the American colonists for their increasingly anti-British behavior
1775 – Citizens of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina declare independence from Great Britain
1784 – The Peace of Versailles ended a war between France, England, and Holland.
1813 – Napoleon Bonaparte leads his French troops into the Battle of Bautzen in Saxony, Germany, against the combined armies of Russia and Prussia. The battle ends the next day with a French victory.
1835 – Otto is named the first modern king of Greece
1845 – HMS Erebus and HMS Terror with 134 men under John Franklin sail from the River Thames in England, beginning a disastrous expedition to find the Northwest Passage. All hands are lost
1861 – During the American Civil War, the capital of the Confederacy was moved from Montgomery, AL, to Richmond, VA.
1862 – US President Abraham Lincoln signs into law the Homestead Act to provide cheap land for the settlement of the American West (80 million acres by 1900)
1873 – Levi Strauss began marketing blue jeans with copper rivets.
1899 – Jacob German of New York City became the first driver to be arrested for speeding. The posted speed limit was 12 miles per hour.
1902 – The U.S. military occupation of Cuba ended.
1903 – Britain’s House of Commons begins a debate on the charges of poor administration and ill treatment of natives in Belgium’s colony in the Congo Free State
1916 – Norman Rockwell’s first cover on “The Saturday Evening Post” appeared.
1917 – Turkish Government authorizes Jews to return to Tel Aviv & Jaffa
1920 – Mexican President Venustiano Carranza, under attack by American petroleum companies, faces an armed rebellion by right-wing Sonoro triumvirate after nationalizing subsoil rights
1926 – The U.S. Congress passed the Air Commerce Act. The act gave the Department of Commerce the right to license pilots and planes.
1927 – Charles Lindbergh took off from New York to cross the Atlantic for Paris aboard his airplane the “Spirit of St. Louis.” The trip took 33 1/2 hours.
1930 – The first airplane was catapulted from a dirigible.
1932 – Amelia Earhart takes off from Newfoundland to begin her historic solo flight to IrelandShe became the first woman to achieve the feat.
1933 – “Charlie Chan” was heard for the final time on the NBC Blue radio network, after only six months on the air.
1939 – The first telecast over telephone wires was sent from Madison Square Garden to the NBC-TV studios at 30 Rockefeller Center in Manhattan. The event was a bicycle race.
1940 – Holocaust: The first prisoners arrive at a new concentration camp at Auschwitz.
1941 – Germany invaded Crete by air.
1942 – Japan completed the conquest of Burma.
1949 – In the United States of America, the Armed Forces Security Agency (predecessor to the National Security Agency) is established.
1954 – Chiang Kai-shek is selected for another term as President of the Republic of China by the National Assembly
1956 – Atomic fusion (thermonuclear) bomb dropped from plane-Bikini Atoll
1959 – Japanese-Americans regain their citizenship
1961 – A white mob attacked the Freedom Riders in Montgomery, AL. The event prompted the federal government to send U.S. marshals.
1969 – U.S. and South Vietnamese forces captured Apbia Mountain, which was referred to as Hamburger Hill.
1970 – 100,000 people marched in New York supporting U.S. policies in Vietnam.
1971 – Pentagon reports blacks constitute 11% of US soldiers in SE Asia
1978 – US launches Pioneer Venus 1; produces first global radar map of Venus
1980 – 710 families in Love Canal area (Niagara Falls NY) are evacuated
1980 – The submarine Nautilus was designated as a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. Secretary of the Interior.
1983 – First publications of the discovery of the virus that causes AIDS in the journal Science by Luc Montagnier and Robert Gallo individually.
1985 – The FBI arrested U.S. Navy Chief Petty Officer John Walker. Walker had begun spying for the Soviet Union in 1968.
1989 – The Chinese authorities declare martial law in the face of pro-democracy demonstrations, setting the scene for the Tiananmen Square massacre.
1990 – The Hubble Space Telescope sent back its first photographs.
1995 – In a second Referendum in Quebec, the population rejects by a slight majority the proposal from its government to move towards independence from Canada
1996 – The U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Colorado measure banning laws that would protect homosexuals from discrimination.
1999 – At Heritage High School in Conyers, GA, a 15-year-old student (TJ Solomon) shot and injured six students. He then surrendered to an assistant principal at the school.
2006 – The Three Gorges Dam is officially opened – The hydroelectric dam is the world’s largest power station in terms of installed capacity. Despite its benefits, the project remains controversial because it flooded archeological and cultural sites and displaced some 1.3 million people.
2010 – Scientists announced that they had created a functional synthetic genome.
2013 – 133 people are killed and 283 are injured in a continued wave of insurgency in Iraq
2015 – 5 major world banks (JPMorgan, Barclays, Citigroup, RBS and UBS) fined US$5.7bn for manipulating currency markets – some of the largest ever fines
2018 – President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela wins a second term in an election marked by boycotts and accusations of vote rigging
2019 – Bangladesh imposes a 65-day ban on coastal fishing to conserve fish stocks
2021 – Israel and Hamas agree to a bilateral ceasefire in Gaza after nearly two weeks of fighting, amid international diplomatic efforts
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
