1957 – The Apalachin Meeting outside Binghamton, New York is raided by law enforcement, and many high level Mafia figures are arrested
1380 – King Charles VI of France crowned at age 12
1524 – Francisco Pizarro begins his 1st great expedition, near Colombia
1666 – Samuel Pepys reports on 1st blood transfusion (between dogs)
1680 – Gottfried Kirch discovers the Great Comet of 1680 (Kirch’s Comet/Newton’s Comet)
1732 – First professional librarian in north America, Louis Timothee, hired in Philadelphia
1832 – The first streetcar went into operation in New York City, NY. The vehicle was horse-drawn and had room for 30 people.
1851 – Moby Dick Makes its Debut in the United States. The epic novel by Herman Melville about Captain Ahab’s quest to find and kill Moby Dick, a white whale had released in the UK in October under the name The Whale. Considered to be one of the best fictional works written in recent history, the book did not sell many copies after its launch or during Melville’s lifetime.
1881 – Charles J. Guiteau’s trial began for the assassination of U.S. President Garfield. Guiteau was convicted and hanged the following year.
1883 – “Treasure Island” by Robert Louis Stevenson is first published as a book by Cassell & Co.
1889 – New York World reporter Nellie Bly (Elizabeth Cochrane) began an attempt to surpass the fictitious journey of Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg by traveling around the world in less than 80 days. Bly succeeded by finishing the journey the following January in 72 days, 6 hours and 11 minutes.
1907 – The Third Duma (Parliament) meets in Russia; following Tsar Nicholas II’s limiting of the franchise, a conservative majority holds sway and suppresses the radical elements
1920 – The Russian Bolshevik army occupies Sebastopol, ending anti-communist attempts to regain the government of Russia
1922 – The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) began domestic radio service.
1927 – World’s largest gas tank in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, explodes; 28 die
1935 – U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed the Philippine Islands a free commonwealth after its new constitution was approved. The Tydings-McDuffie Act planned for the Phillipines to be completely independent by July 4, 1946.
1935 – Nazis deprive German Jews of their citizenship
1940 – During World War II, German war planes destroyed most of the English town of Coventry when about 500 Luftwaffe bombers attacked.
1954 – Egyptian President Naguib resigns, state of emergency declared
1956 – The USSR crushed the Hungarian uprising.
1957 – The Apalachin Meeting outside Binghamton, New York is raided by law enforcement, and many high level Mafia figures are arrested https://mafia-history.org/events/apalachin-meeting.php
1960 – Riot due to school integration in New Orleans
1965 – US government sends 90,000 soldiers to Vietnam
1968 – Yale University announced it was going co-educational.
1969 – Apollo 12 blasted off for the moon from Cape Kennedy, FL.
1969 – During the Vietnam War, Major General Bruno Arthur Hochmuth, commander of the Third Marine Division, became the first general to be killed in Vietnam by enemy fire.
1971 – First spacecraft to orbit a planet. NASA’s Mariner 9 entered Mars’ orbit after 167 days in space. Despite it being in Mars’ orbit within 15 minutes, a dust storm on the planet made it impossible for Mariner 9 to take pictures of Mars until January.
1972 – Blue Ribbon Sports became Nike.
1973 – Britain’s Princess Anne married a commoner, Capt. Mark Phillips, in Westminster Abbey. They divorced in 1992, and Princess Anne re-married.
1979 – U.S. President Carter froze all Iranian assets in the United States and U.S. banks abroad in response to the taking of 63 American hostages at the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran.
1983 – The British government announced that U.S.-made cruise missiles had arrived at the Greenham Common air base amid protests.
1984 – Zamboanga City mayor Cesar Climaco, a prominent critic of the government of Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, is assassinated in his home city.
1988 – Israeli President Chaim Herzog formally asked Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to form a new government.
1989 – The U.S. Navy ordered an unprecedented 48-hour stand-down in the wake of a recent string of serious accidents.
1991 – After 13 years in exile Cambodian Prince Norodom Sihanouk returned to his homeland.
1993 – Puerto Rico votes against becoming the 51st US state
1994 – U.S. experts visited North Korea’s main nuclear complex for the first time under an accord that opened such sites to outside inspections.
1995 – The U.S. government instituted a partial shutdown, closing national parks and museums while most government offices operated with skeleton crews.
2001 – OPEC announces that it intends to cut its crude oil output quotas by 1.5 million barrels per day effective, but only if non-OPEC producers cut their output by 500,000 barrels per day as well
2002 – The United States House of Representatives votes not to create an independent commission to investigate the September 11 attacks
2008 – Eurozone officially slips into recession for the first time since its creation in 1999, pushed down by recessions in Germany and Italy
2012 – A series of protests against austerity measures occur across Europe including Spain, Portugal, and Greece
2012 – CFBDSIR 2149-0403 is discovered, the closest rogue planet to earth (100 light-years away)
2017 – Zimbabwe Army seizes key sites in capital Harare following tensions over Robert Mugabe’s dismissal of vice-president Emmerson Mnangagwa
2018 – Astronomers announce discovery of Super-Earth planet (3.2x bigger than Earth) orbiting red dwarf Barnard’s star, 6 light years away
2018 – Attempt to move 720,000 Rohingya back to Myanmar from Bangladesh refugee camps amid international criticism. They refuse to go.
2021 – Attack on a military police outpost near a gold mine in Inata, northern Burkina Faso, kills at least 53, prompting three days of national mourning
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
