1975 – The First Episode of Saturday Night Live Airs, A popular sketch comedy show, SNL, as it is popularly known, was initially called NBC’s Saturday Night, and it was created and produced by Lorne Michaels. The original cast members of the show, which usually opens with the slogan “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!”, included Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, and Chevy Chase.
1138 – Earthquake in Aleppo, Syria, kills an estimated 230,000
1142 – Treaty of Shaoxing ratified with Chinese southern Song Dynasty agreeing to pay tribute to northern Jin dynasty
1521 – Pope Leo X titles King Henry VIII of England “Defender of the Faith”
1614 – Adriaen Block and 12 Amsterdam merchants petition the States General for exclusive trading rights in the New Netherland colony.
1698 – France, England & Netherlands ratified the First Partition Treaty, which eventually led to the War of the Spanish Succession
1737 – Earthquake reported to have killed 300,000 and destroyed half of Calcutta in India. Now thought to have been an exaggerated account of a hurricane which claimed 3,000 of the city’s estimated 20,000 residents
1776 – During the American Revolution the first naval battle of Lake Champlain was fought. The forces under Gen. Benedict Arnold suffered heavy losses.
1864 – Slavery abolished in Maryland
1865 – Paul Bogle led hundreds of black men and women in a march in Jamaica, starting the Morant Bay rebellion.
1865 – President Andrew Johnson paroles Confederate States VP Alexander H. Stephens
1869 – Thomas Edison filed for a patent on his first invention. The electric machine was used for counting votes for the U.S. Congress, however the Congress did not buy it.
1890 – The Daughters of the American Revolution was founded in Washington, DC.
1899 – The Boer War began in South Africa between the British and the Boers of the Transvaal and Orange Free State.
1906 – San Francisco Board of Education orders segregation in separate schools of Japanese, Chinese, and Korean children sparking diplomatic crisis
1922 – First woman FBI “special investigator”, Alaska Davidson, appointed
1929 – JC Penney opens store #1252 in Milford, Delaware, making it a nationwide company with stores in all 48 U.S. states.
1932 – In New York, the first telecast of a political campaign was aired.
1939 – U.S. President Roosevelt was presented with a letter from Albert Einstein that urged him to develop the U.S. atomic program rapidly.
1942 – The Battle of Cape Esperance, during World War II, began in the Solomons.
1945 – Chinese civil war begins between Kuomintang government led by Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong’s Communist Party
1950 – The U.S. Federal Communications Commission issues the first license to broadcast television in color, to CBS
1958 – Pioneer 1, a lunar probe, was launched by the U.S. The probe did not reach its destination and fell back to Earth and burned up in the atmosphere.
1968 – Apollo 7 was launched by the U.S. The first manned Apollo mission was the first in which live television broadcasts were received from orbit. Wally Schirra, Don Fulton Eisele and R. Walter Cunningham were the astronauts aboard.
1969 – Three people shot dead during street violence in the loyalist Shankill area of Belfast
1975 – The First Episode of Saturday Night Live Airs, A popular sketch comedy show, SNL, as it is popularly known, was initially called NBC’s Saturday Night, and it was created and produced by Lorne Michaels. The original cast members of the show, which usually opens with the slogan “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!”, included Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, and Chevy Chase.
1976 – Mao Zedong’s widow Jiang Qing and the “Gang of Four” are arrested and charged with plotting a coup
1982 – English ship Mary Rose, which sank during an engagement with France in 1545, raised at Portsmouth, England
1983 – The last hand-cranked telephones in the U.S. went out of service. The 440 telephone customers of Bryant Pond, ME, were switched to direct-dial service.
1984 – First American Woman to walk in Space, Kathryn Dwyer Sullivan undertook a 3.5-hour long space walk with fellow astronaut David Leestma while on the Space Shuttle Challenger mission STS-41-G. The spacewalk was performed to demonstrate the possibility of refueling a satellite. STS-41-G was the first flight mission to carry two women astronauts – Sullivan and Sally Ride.
1987 – 200,000 march for gay and lesbian civil rights in Washington, D.C.
1990 – Oil hits a record $40.42 per barrel
1991 – Law Professor Anita Hill testifies Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her
1991 – Televangelist Jimmy Swaggart seen soliciting a prostitute
1994 – U.S. troops in Haiti took control of the National Palace.
1994 – Iraqi troops began moving away from the Kuwaiti border.
1994 – The Colorado Supreme Court declared that the anti-gay rights measure in the state was unconstitutional.
1998 – A Congo Airlines Boeing 727 is shot down by rebels in Kindu, Democratic Republic of the Congo, killing 40 people.
2000 – 100th Mission of NASA’s Space Shuttle Program, Also known as the Space Transportation System or STS, the program was the first in the world to employ reusable spacecraft to take people into outer space. The first flight of the space shuttle fleet, which included Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour took place on April 12, 1981. The 100th flight was on space shuttle Discovery and the mission was designated STS-92. It was the 30th time Discovery had flown into space.
2002 – A bomb attack in a shopping mall in Vantaa, Finland kills seven.
2020 – India records more than 7 million cases of COVID-19
2021 – Las Vegas Raiders head coach Jon Gruden steps down after The NY Times details emails in which he made homophobic and misogynistic remarks; earlier reports alleged racist statements about a union leader
REFERENCE: history.net, onthisday.com, thepeopleshistory.com, timeanddate.com, scopesys.com, on-this-day.com
