1485: Battle of Bosworth Field: Henry Tudor’s forces defeat English King Richard III during the last battle in the Wars of the Roses. Richard is killed, becoming the last English monarch to die in battle. 1639: Madras (now Chennai), India, is founded by the British East India Company on a sliver of land bought from […]
1703: Edirne Incident: Turkish army ousts Sultan Mustafa II, replacing him with his brother Ahmed III, reducing the power of the Sultan 1772: King Gustav III of Sweden completes a coup d’état by adopting a new constitution and installing himself as an enlightened despot, ending fifty years of parliamentary rule 1888: American inventor William Seward […]
1597: First Dutch East India Company ships return from the Far East 1741: Alaska is first sighted by a Russian expedition led by Danish explorer Vitus Bering 1905: Chinese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen forms the first chapter of Tongmenghui, a union of secret societies determined to bring down the Qing dynasty 1968: 250,000 Soviet and Warsaw […]
43 BC: Octavian, later known as Augustus, compels the Roman Senate to elect him consul 1839: Louis Daguerre’s daguerreotype photographic process with complete working instructions is published “free to the world” in Paris as a gift from the French government 1942: World War II: Over 4,000 Canadian and British soldiers are killed, wounded, or captured […]
1590: Governor of Roanoke Island colony John White returns from England to find no trace of the colonists he left there three years earlier 1737: First public admission to the Salon de Paris art exhibition at the Louvre in Paris 1838: United States Exploring Expedition headed by Charles Wilkes departs for the Pacific Ocean and […]
1903: Joseph Pulitzer donates $1 million to Columbia University and begins the Pulitzer Prizes in the United States 1945: Korea is divided into North and South Korea along the 38th parallel 1945: Sukarno and Mohammad Hatta declare Indonesia (formerly the Dutch East Indies) independent from the Netherlands 1947: The Radcliffe Line is revealed, setting the […]
1513: Battle of the Spurs at Guinegate (now Enguinegatte): King Henry VIII of England and Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I defeat French forces, capturing the town and routing the French cavalry 1858: Britain’s Queen Victoria telegraphs US President James Buchanan for the first time via transatlantic telegraph cable; he replies, “It is a triumph more […]
1281: During Kublai Khan’s second Mongol invasion of Japan, his invading Chinese fleet of 3,500 vessels disappears in a typhoon near the Japanese coast 1842: US Army Colonel Worth declares the Second Seminole War over after nearly seven years; over 3,000 surviving members of the Seminole Nation are forcibly relocated from Florida to Oklahoma, with […]
1521: Spanish conquistadors led by Hernán Cortés capture Aztec Emperor Cuauhtémoc in Tenochtitlan, bringing the Aztec Empire to an end 1536: Buddhist monks from Kyoto’s Enryaku-ji Temple set fire to 21 Nichiren temples throughout Kyoto in the Tenbun Hokke Disturbance (Traditional Japanese date: July 27, 1536) 1642: Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens discovers Mars’s southern polar […]
1121: Battle of Didgori: Georgian army under King David the Builder wins a decisive victory over the renowned Seljuk commander Ilghazi 1480: Ottoman troops conquer Otranto in southern Italy after a 15-day siege, killing 12,000, enslaving 5,000, and beheading 800 Christians for refusing to convert to Islam 1851: American inventor Isaac Singer patents his famous […]
