43 BC: Roman orator and politician Marcus Tullius Cicero is assassinated in Formiae by soldiers under the command of Mark Antony 1909: Inventor Leo Baekeland patents the first thermosetting plastic, Bakelite, sparking the birth of the plastics industry 1941: The Imperial Japanese Navy, with 353 planes, attacks the US fleet at Pearl Harbor Naval Base, […]
1240: Mongols led by Batu Khan occupy and destroy Kyiv after an eight-day siege; out of 50,000 people in the city, only 2,000 survive 1865: 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution is ratified, abolishing slavery except as a punishment for crime where the party has been duly convicted 1877: Thomas Edison enters the offices […]
771: Charlemagne becomes the sole King of the Franks after the death of his brother Carloman 1349: 500 Jews of the Free Imperial City of Nuremberg are massacred during Black Death riots, part of a wave of pogroms across Western Europe 1456: Earthquake strikes Naples, killing an estimated 35,000 people 1848: US President James K. […]
1534: Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent occupies Baghdad 1563: Council of Trent holds its last session after 18 years, the last ecumenical council for more than 300 years Famous and historically inaccurate painting of the English Pilgrims and Native American Wampanoag gathering and sharing a mealThe First Thanksgiving 1619: Thirty-eight colonists from Berkeley Parish, England, […]
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: South African surgeon Dr. Christiaan Barnard performs the world’s first […]
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 […]
1913: Ford Motor Company institutes the world’s first moving assembly line for the Model T Ford 1934: Leningrad mayor Sergei Kirov is assassinated, 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 […]
1016: King of Denmark, Cnut the Great [Canute], claims the English throne after the death of Edmund Ironside The German Beer Purity Law (Reinheitsgebot)German Beer Purity Law 1487: The first German Beer Purity Law (Reinheitsgebot) is promulgated in Munich by Albert IV, Duke of Bavaria, stating that beer should be brewed from only three ingredients: […]
1877: US inventor Thomas Edison demonstrates his hand-cranked phonograph for the first time 1910: The first US patent for a traffic light system is issued to Chicago engineer Ernest Sirrine [1] 1935: Physicist Erwin Schrödinger publishes his famous thought experiment “Schrödinger’s cat”, a paradox that illustrates the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics […]
1520: Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan begins crossing the Pacific Ocean 1814: The Times of London is first printed by automatic, steam-powered presses built by German inventors Friedrich Koenig and Andreas Friedrich Bauer, making newspapers available to a mass audience 1893: New Zealand women vote for the first time in a national election [1] 1919: American-born […]
