1960 – New Orleans elementary schools begin desegregation under an order from U.S. Circuit Judge J. Skelly Wright, the McDonogh Three join McDonogh 19 Elementary School and Ruby Bridges joins William Frantz Elementary School. They are met with death threats and racial slurs while the schools faced immediate boycotts.
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 first blood transfusion (between dogs)
1732 – The first US professional librarian, 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.
1834 – William Thomson, later scientist Lord Kelvin, enters Glasgow University at just 10 yrs 4 months
1851 – Herman Melville’s novel “Moby Dick” was first published in the U.S.
1862 – American Civil War: President Abraham Lincoln approves General Ambrose Burnside’s plan to capture the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia, leading to the Battle of Fredericksburg
1881 – Charles J. Guiteau’s trial began for the assassination of U.S. President Garfield. Guiteau was convicted and hanged the following year.
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.
1896 – Power plant at Niagara Falls begins operation
1908 – Albert Einstein presents his quantum theory of light
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.
1939 – Oil refinery fire kills 500 & destroys Lagunillas Venezuela
1940 – During World War II, German war planes destroyed most of the English town of Coventry when about 500 Luftwaffe bombers attacked.
1941 – Governr-General Wouters of Dutch Antilles refuses Jews refuge
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
1960 – New Orleans elementary schools begin desegregation under an order from U.S. Circuit Judge J. Skelly Wright, the McDonogh Three join McDonogh 19 Elementary School and Ruby Bridges joins William Frantz Elementary School. They are met with death threats and racial slurs while the schools faced immediate boycotts.
1965 – US government sends 90,000 soldiers to Vietnam
1967 – The Congress of Colombia in commemoration of the 150 years of the death of Policarpa Salavarrieta, declares this day as “Day of the Colombian Woman”
1968 – Yale University announced it was going co-educational.
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 – 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.
1973 – Britain’s Princess Anne married a commoner, Capt. Mark Phillips, in Westminster Abbey. They divorced in 1992, and Princess Anne re-married.
1975 – Spain abandoned the Spanish (Western) Sahara
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.
1982 – Lech Wasa, the leader of Poland’s outlawed Solidarity movement, is released after eleven months of internment near the Soviet border.
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.
1990 – Simon and Schuster announced it had dropped plans to publish Bret Easton Ellis novel “American Psycho.”
1991 – American and British authorities announce indictments against two Libyan intelligence officials in connection with the downing of the Pan Am Flight 103.
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
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
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
2022 – Earliest evidence of fire being used to cook by humans found in study of fish remains 780,000 years ago at Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in northern Israel
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
