43 BC: Marcus Tullius Cicero, Roman orator and politician is assassinated in Formiae 1909: Inventor Leo Baekeland patents the first thermo-setting plastic, Bakelite, sparking the birth of the plastics industry 1941: Imperial Japanese Navy with 353 planes attack the US fleet at Pearl Harbor Naval Base, Hawaii, killing 2,403 people 1965: Pope Paul VI & Orthodox Patriarch Athenagoras I simultaneously lift mutual excommunications that led […]
1240: Mongols under Batu Khan occupy and destroy Kiev; out of 50,000 people in the city only 2,000 survive 1865: 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution is ratified, abolishing slavery 1921: Anglo-Irish Treaty signed; Ireland receives dominion status; partition creates Northern Ireland 1998: Hugo Chávez is elected President of Venezuela 2006: NASA reveals photographs taken by Mars Global Surveyor suggesting the […]
771: Charlemagne becomes the sole King of the Franks after the death of his brother Carloman 1349: 500 Jews of Nuremberg massacred during Black Death riots 1456: Earthquake strikes Naples; about 35,000 die 1848: US President James K. Polk triggers gold rush of 1849 by confirming a gold discovery in California 1933: Prohibition ends in the US when 21st Amendment to the US Constitution ratified, 18th Amendment repealed […]
1534: Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent occupies Baghdad 1563: Council of Trent holds its last session, after 18 years. Last ecumenical council for more than 300 years. 1619: 38 colonists from Berkeley Parish, England disembark in Virginia and give thanks to God. Considered by many the first Thanksgiving in the Americas. 1791: Britain’s Observer, oldest Sunday newspaper in the world, first […]
1586: Sir Thomas Herriot introduces potatoes to England from Colombia 1854: Eureka Stockade: In what is claimed by many to be the birth of Australian democracy, more than 20 goldminers at Ballarat, Victoria, are killed by state troopers in an uprising over mining licences 1967: 1st human heart transplant performed in South Africa by Dr Christiaan Barnard on […]
1804: General Napoleon Bonaparte is crowned Emperor of the French at the Notre Dame de Paris in a ceremony officiated by Pope Pius VII 1823: US President James Monroe declares the “Monroe Doctrine” opposing European colonialism in the Americas, arguing any European political intervention in the New World would be a hostile act against the United States 1845: US President James K. Polk announces to Congress that […]
1913: Ford Motor Company institutes world’s 1st moving assembly line for the Model T Ford 1934: Leningrad mayor Sergey Kirov is assassinated and Joseph Stalin uses it as an excuse to begin his Great Purge of 1934-38 1955: Rosa Parks is arrested for refusing to move to the back of a bus and give her seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama […]
1016: Cnut the Great [Canute], King of Denmark, claims the English throne after the death of Edmund ‘Ironside’ 1487: The first German Beer Purity Law (Reinheitsgebot), is promulgated in Munich by Albert IV, Duke of Bavaria stating beer should be brewed from only three ingredients – water, malt and hops 1648: English Parliamentary army captures King Charles I 1786: Grand Duke of Tuscany Leopold […]
526: A possible date for the Antioch earthquake in present-day Syria (then the Byzantine Empire) which killed 200,000 people 1745: Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army moves into Manchester and occupies Carlisle 1877: US inventor Thomas Edison demonstrates his hand-cranked phonograph for the first time 1935: Physicist Erwin Schrödinger publishes his famous thought experiment “Schrödinger’s cat”, a paradox that illustrates the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of […]
1520: Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan begins crossing the Pacific Ocean 1814: The Times of London first printed by automatic, steam powered presses built by German inventors Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Friedrich Bauer – makes newspapers available to a mass audience 1893: Women vote in a national election for the first time, in the New Zealand general election 1919: American-born Lady Nancy Astor elected as […]
