1720: The Ship “Le Grand St Antoine” reaches Marseille, bringing Europe’s last major plague outbreak. Kills around 100,000. 1810: In the May Revolution, citizens of Buenos Aires expel the Spanish Viceroy Cisneros during Semana de Mayo 1914: British House of Commons passes the Irish Home Rule Bill 1961: JFK announces US goal of putting a man on the Moon before […]
1595: Nomenclator of Leiden University Library appears, the first printed catalog of an institutional library 1738: John Wesley is converted, launching the Methodist movement; celebrated annually by Methodists as Aldersgate Day 1844: Samuel Morse taps out “What hath God wrought” in the world’s first telegraph message 1883: Brooklyn Bridge opened by President Chester A. Arthur and NY Governor Grover Cleveland […]
1618: Second Defenestration of Prague: Two Catholic Lords Regent and their secretary are thrown out of a window and amazingly are not seriously injured by the 70 foot (21m) fall. Triggers the Thirty Years’ War. 1785: Benjamin Franklin announces his invention of bifocals 1813: South American independence leader Simón Bolívar enters Mérida, leading the invasion of Venezuela, and is proclaimed El […]
334 BC The Macedonian army of Alexander the Great defeats Darius III of Persia in the Battle of the Granicus 1570: 1st atlas ‘Theatrum Orbis Terrarum’ (Theatre of the World), published by Abraham Ortelius in Antwerp with 70 maps 1843: 1st wagon train with 700 – 1000 migrants, departs Independence, Missouri for Oregon 1939: Germany’s Adolf Hitler and Italy’s Benito Mussolini sign the “Pact of Steel” […]
1792: Mount Unzen on Japan’s Shimabara Peninsula, erupts creating a tsunami, killing about 15,000; Japan’s deadliest volcanic eruption 1832: 1st US Democratic National Convention held in Baltimore 1871: -July 28] French regular troops attack Commune of Paris; 17,000 die 1927: Aviator Charles Lindbergh, in the Spirit of St Louis, lands in Paris after the first solo air crossing of Atlantic […]
1498: Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama arrives at Calicut, India becoming the first European to reach India by sea 1609: Shakespeare’s Sonnets are first published in London, perhaps illicitly, by publisher Thomas Thorpe 1862: US President Abraham Lincoln signs into law the Homestead Act to provide cheap land for the settlement of the American West (80 million acres by 1900) 1864: Spotsylvania campaign […]
1536: Anne Boleyn, second wife of English King Henry VIII, is beheaded at the Tower of London on charges of adultery, incest and treason 1643: Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Connecticut and New Harbor form the United Colonies of New England 1649: England is declared a Commonwealth by an act of the Rump Parliament making England a republic for the next […]
1792: 24 merchants form the New York Stock Exchange at 70 Wall Street 1803: John Hawkins and Richard French patent the Reaping Machine 1861: First Color Photograph, of a tartan ribbon is shown by Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell to the Royal Institution in London 1973: US Senate Watergate Committee begins its hearings into the break-in at the Democratic National Committee […]
1868: US Senate fails to impeach President Andrew Johnson by one vote 1920: French heroine Joan of Arc is canonized as a saint by Pope Benedict XV 1943: Operation Chastise: No. 617 Squadron RAF begins the famous Dambusters Raid, bombing the Möhne and Eder dams in the Ruhr valley with bouncing bombs 1944: 1st of 180,000+ Hungarian Jews reach Auschwitz 1989: Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping meet in Beijing […]
1252: Pope Innocent IV issues the papal bull ad exstirpanda, which authorizes, but also limits, the torture of heretics in the Medieval Inquisition 1618: German astronomer Johannes Kepler discovers the third of his three planetary laws. the “harmonic law” 1841: First emigrant wagon train to make it to California leaves Independence, Missouri on a 1,730 mile journey over the Sierra Nevada […]
