1973 – US President Richard Nixon authorizes construction of the Alaskan pipeline
0013 – General Tiberius’ (later Emperor) triumphant procession through Rome after siege of Germany
0534 – Second and final revision of the Justinian Code published, a codified set of imperial and classical laws begun initially in 528
1384 – Jadwiga is crowned King of Poland, although she is a woman.
1491 – An auto de fe, held in the Brasero de la Dehesa outside of vila, concludes the case of the Holy Child of La Guardia with the public execution of several Jewish and converso suspects.
1519 – City of Havana moved to its current location to avoid mosquito infestations
1532 – Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro captures Inca Emperor Atahualpa after a surprise ambush at Cajamarca in the Peruvian Andes
1581 – Tsar Ivan the Terrible attacks his son and heir, Ivan Ivanovich, with a scepter after an argument leading to the latter’s death three days later
1632 – The Battle of Lutzen, where king Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden is killed.
1676 – First colonial prison organized, Nantucket, Massachusetts
1763 – English journalist John Wilkes injured in a duel
1776 – American Revolutionary War: British and Hessian troops take Fort Washington, New York marking one of biggest losses by US forces
1798 – Kentucky becomes first state to nullify an act of Congress
1849 – A Russian court sentences Fyodor Dostoevsky to death for anti-government activities linked to a radical intellectual group; his sentence is later commuted to hard labor.
1871 – The National Rifle Association of America (NRA) was first chartered in the State of New York.
1885 – Canadian rebel Louis Riel was executed for high treason.
1894 – 6,000 Armenians massacred by Turks in Kurdistan
1906 – Opera star Enrico Caruso is charged with an indecent act after allegedly pinching a woman’s bottom in the monkey house of New York City’s Central Park Zoo
1907 – Oklahoma was admitted as the 46th state.
1915 – Coca-Cola had its prototype for a contoured bottle patented. The bottle made its commercial debut the next year.
1919 – Admiral Miklós Horthy, head of the Hungarian National Army, seizes Budapest and will later become regent of the restored Kingdom of Hungary
1922 – Pope Pius XI calls on Belgian people to unite
1933 – The United States and the Soviet Union established diplomatic relations for the first time.
1939 – Destruction of Talmudic Academy in Lublin and its huge library, which gave “so much pleasure to its conquerors that it was recalled with glee more than a year later.”
1940 – Holocaust: In occupied Poland, German Nazis close off the Warsaw Ghetto from the outside world.
1945 – UNESCO founded, The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a special branch of the United Nations which promotes peace and well-being through education, scientific collaboration and cultural understanding and exchange.
1950 – US President Harry Truman proclaims emergency crisis caused by communist threat
1952 – In the Peanuts comic strip, Lucy first held a football for Charlie Brown.
1957 – Serial killer Edward Gein murders his last victim, Bernice Worden
1960 – U.S. marshals escort four six-year-old African-American girls to previously all-white public schools in New Orleans, in response to death threats against the girls and race riots
1961 – US President JFK decides to increase military aid to South Vietnam without committing US combat troops
1966 – Dr. Samuel H. Sheppard was acquitted in his second trial of charges he had murdered his pregnant wife, Marilyn, in 1954.
1967 – Canadian Pacific begins testing Canada’s first remote-controlled mid-train diesel locomotives in regular freight service, using new “Robot” radio-command system.
1969 – The U.S. Army announced that several had been charged with massacre and the subsequent cover-up in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam on March 16, 1968.
1970 – South Vietnamese Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky defends operations in Cambodia because communist forces could overrun South Vietnam “within 24 hours” if troops operating there were withdrawn
1973 – US President Richard Nixon authorizes construction of the Alaskan pipeline
1974 – First intentional interstellar radio message sent, Arecibo telescope towards M 41, a cluster of stars some 25,000 light years away
1981 – President Reagan decides on a covert plan to block the Cuban aid to Nicaragua and El Salvador
1982 – An agreement was announced on the 57th day of a strike by National Football League (NFL) players.
1985 – Colonel Oliver North was put in charge of the shipment of HAWK anti-aircraft missiles to Iran.
1988 – In the first open election in more than a decade, voters in Pakistan elect populist candidate Benazir Bhutto to be Prime Minister of Pakistan
1989 – A death squad composed of El Salvadoran army troops kills six Jesuit priests and two others at Jose Simeon Canas University.
1997 – China released Wei Jingsheng, a pro-democracy dissident from jail for medical reasons. He had been incarcerated for almost 18 years.
1999 – Chrica Adams, the pregnant girlfriend of Rae Carruth, was shot four times in her car. She died a month later from her wounds. The baby survived. Carruth was sentenced to a minimum of 18 years and 11 months in prison for his role in the murder.
2000 – Bill Clinton became the first serving U.S. president to visit Communist Vietnam.
2002 – The first case of SARS is recorded in Foshan City, Guangdong Province, China, though is not identified until much later. First patient is thought to be a farmer in the city.
2004 – A NASA unmanned “scramjet” (X-43A) reached a speed of nearly 10 times the speed of sound above the Pacific Ocean.
2015 – French President François Hollande declares the country at war with ISIS in an address to parliament
2018 – CIA concludes Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi
2019 – Samoa declares state of emergency over measles epidemic closing all schools after six deaths
2022 – U.S. Food and Drug Administration gives first safety approval on lab-grown meat, chicken grown from animal cells made by Upside Foods
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
