1941 – The HMS Hood was sunk by the German battleship Bismarck in the North Atlantic. Only three people survived.
1218 – The Fifth Crusade leaves Acre for Egypt
1610 – Sir Thomas Gates institutes “laws divine moral and marshal,” a harsh civil code for Jamestown.
1624 – After years of unprofitable operation Virginia’s charter was revoked and it became a royal colony.
1689 – The English Parliament passed Act of Toleration, protecting Protestants. Roman Catholics were specifically excluded from exemption.
1738 – The Methodist Church was established.
1755 – Smuggler Louis Mandrin considered the French Robin Hood is sentenced to be broken on the wheel, a medieval form of torture and execution that breaks the bones of the subject
1764 – Bostonian lawyer James Otis denounced “taxation without representation” and called for the colonies to unite in demonstrating their opposition to Britain’s new tax measures.
1798 – Believing that a French invasion of Ireland was imminent, Irish nationalists rose up against the British occupation.
1844 – Samuel F.B. Morse formally opened America’s first telegraph line. The first message was sent from Washington, DC, to Baltimore, MD. The message was “What hath God wrought?”
1856 – Pottawatomie Massacre: John Brown and abolitionist settlers kill five pro-slavery settlers in Franklin County, Kansas
1861 – Union Major General Benjamin Butler declares slaves “contraband of war”
1863 – Bushwackers led by Captain William Marchbanks attacked a U.S. Federal militia party in Nevada, Missouri.
1883 – After 14 years of construction the Brooklyn Bridge was opened to traffic.
1884 – Anti-Monopoly party & Greenback Party forms People’s Party in US
1894 – Lowell Observatory, Arizona, first begins observations of Mars with an eighteen-inch telescope, leads its builder Percival Lowell to conclude there are canals on Mars
1913 – The U.S. Department of Labor entered into its first strike mediation. The dispute was between the Railroad Clerks of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad.
1915 – Thomas Edison invents telescribe to record telephone conversations
1921 – Bulhoek Massacre: police commissioner Colonel Theodore Truter leads 6 squadrons and artillery detachment against Israelite religious sect collected at annual gathering on land of leader Enoch Mgijima at Ntabalanga; 190 killed
1941 – The HMS Hood was sunk by the German battleship Bismarck in the North Atlantic. Only three people survived.
1943 – Final entry in the Stroop Report, detailing the destruction of the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto, compiled by Nazi officers, later used as evidence in the Nuremberg trials
1958 – United Press International was formed through a merger of the United Press and the International News Service.
1959 – 1st house with built-in bomb shelter exhibited (Pleasant Hills, Pennsylvania)
1961 – The Freedom Riders were arrested in Jackson, Mississippi.
1965 – Supreme Court declares federal law allowing post office to intercept communist propaganda is unconstitutional
1970 – Engineers begin drilling the world’s deepest hole – The Kola Superdeep Borehole had reached the unsurpassed depth of 12,262 meters (40,230 feet) before the project was abandoned due to a lack of funding.
1980 – The International Court of Justice issued a final decision calling for the release of the hostages taken at the U.S. embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979.
1983 – The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the federal government had the right to deny tax breaks to schools that racially discriminate.
1988 – Section 28 passed as law by Parliament in the United Kingdom prohibiting the promotion of homosexuality. Repealed 2001/2004
1989 – Sonia Sutcliffe, wife of the Yorkshire Ripper, is awarded £600,000 in damages after winning a libel action against satirical magazine Private Eye (later reduced to £60,000 on appeal).
1993 – Roman Catholic Cardinal Juan Jesus Posada Ocampo and six other people were killed at the Guadalajara, Mexico, airport in a shootout that involved drug gangs.
1993 – The Ethiopian province of Eritrea declared itself an independent nation.
1994 – The four men convicted of bombing the New York’s World Trade Center were each sentenced to 240 years in prison.
2000 – Five people were killed and two others wounded when two gunmen entered a Wendy’s restaurant in Flushing, Queens, New York. The gunmen tied up the victims in the basement and then shot them.
2000 – The U.S. House of Representatives approved permanent normal trade relations with China. China was not happy about some of the human rights conditions that had been attached by the U.S. lawmakers.
2000 – Israeli troops pulled out of Lebanon after 18 consecutive years of occupation.
2001 – Vermont senator James Jeffords quit the Republican Party and became an Independent, giving Democrats control of the Senate.
2016 – Bill Cosby is ordered to stand trial in a sexual assault case in Norristown
2018 – Record US fentanyl seizure of 120lbs (54kg) confirmed by police in Nebraska in April, enough to kill 26 million people, one of largest drug busts in US history
2018 – US President Donald Trump signs into law the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act easing financial regulations and reducing oversight for banks
2020 – Millions of cicadas in a once in 17-year event about to emerge from the earth in the US south posing crop danger and noise issues, according to scientists from Virginia Tech
2021 – Constitutional crisis deepens in Samoa after Speaker of the House shuts out Fiame Naomi Mata’afa from being sworn in as the country’s first woman leader in 56 years
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
