1415 – Religious reformers John Wycliffe and Jan Hus are condemned as heretics at the Council of Constance
1493 – Alexander VI divided non-Christian world between Spain and Portugal.
1535 – Five Carthusian monks from London Charterhouse monastery hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, London, for refusing to acknowledge Henry VIII as head of the Church of England
1626 – Peter Minuit landed in Manhattan, which he later bought for $24 worth of cloth and brass buttons.
1675 – King Charles II of England commissions the Royal Observatory in Greenwich – The observatory was built on the prime meridian. The mean solar time at this location is the basis for Greenwich Mean Time (GMT).
1776 – Rhode Island declared its freedom from England two months before the Declaration of Independence was adopted.
1864 – General Ulysses S. Grant’s Union Army at Potomac attacks Robert E. Lee’s Confederates at Rappahannock River
1868 – World’s largest book, the Kuthodaw Inscription Shrines recording whole of Buddhist scriptures on 729 marble tablets completed and opened to the public in Mandalay, Burma
1886 – A bomb exploded on the fourth day of a workers’ strike in Chicago, IL. Eight people died in the violence during violence that day.
1893 – Cowboy Bill Pickett invents bulldogging, the skill of grabbing cattle by the horns and wrestling them to the ground
1904 – The U.S. formally took control of the property for construction of the Panama Canal.
1916 – Germany agreed to limit its submarine warfare after a demand from U.S. President Wilson.
1925 – League of Nations conference on arms control & poison gas usage
1927 – Nicaragua agrees to a US supervised presidential election in 1928
1942 – The Battle of the Coral Sea commenced as American and Japanese carriers launched their attacks at each other.
1942 – The United States began food rationing
1945 – German forces in Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands surrender unconditionally to British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery at Luneburg Heath
1949 – Plane carrying the entire Torino Serie A soccer squad crashes on the outskirts of Turin, Italy; 31 killed; Torino awarded League title at the request of their rivals
1961 – Civil rights activists, called “freedom riders,” left Washington, DC for New Orleans.
1970 – The Ohio National Guardsmen opened fire on students during an anti-Vietnam war protest at Kent State University. Four students were killed and nine others were wounded.
1972 – “The Don’t Make A Wave Committee,” a fledgling environmental organization founded in Canada in 1971, officially changes its name to the “Greenpeace Foundation”
1977 – US Catholic bishops rescind automatic excommunications for divorced and remarried Catholics (receiving communion still outlawed if the previous marriages were not annulled by Church tribunals)
1979 – Margaret Thatcher became Britain’s first woman prime minister.
1994 – Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasser Arafat signed a historic accord on Palestinian autonomy that granted self-rule in the Gaza Strip and Jericho.
1998 – A federal judge in Sacramento, California, gives “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski four life sentences plus 30 years after Kaczynski accepts a plea agreement sparing him from the death penalty.
2013 – 5 US soldiers are killed by a bomb in Kandahar, Afghanistan
2020 – World leaders pledge $8 billion to research treatments and a vaccine for COVID-19, with the US and Russia not taking part
2021 – Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador makes an historic apology to the Mayan people for abuses against them in the five centuries since the Spanish conquest
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
