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 Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini sign “Pact of Steel” in Berlin, […]
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 […]
1291: After 100 years of Crusader control, Acre is the last Crusader stronghold reconquered and destroyed by the Mamluks under Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil 1804: Napoleon Bonaparte proclaimed Emperor of France by the French Senate 1896: Khodynka Tragedy: A mass panic on Khodynka Field, Moscow, during the festivities of the coronation of Russian Tsar Nicholas II, results in the deaths of […]
1527: Pánfilo de Narváez departs Spain to explore Florida with 600 men – by 1536 only 4 survive 1792: 24 merchants form New York Stock Exchange at 70 Wall Street 1803: John Hawkins & Richard French patent the Reaping Machine 1973: Senate Watergate Committee begins its hearings 2004: Massachusetts becomes the first U.S. state to legalize same-sex marriage 2014: The center-right […]
1920: Joan of Arc (Jeanne D’arc) canonized a saint 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 and formally end a 30-year rift 2013: Human stem cells are successfully cloned […]
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 his “harmonics law” 1869: National Woman Suffrage Association forms in New York, founded by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton 1940: Richard and Maurice McDonald open the […]
1787: Delegates gather in Philadelphia to draw up US Constitution 1796: English country doctor Edward Jenner administers his revolutionary cowpox-based vaccine for smallpox, in Berkeley, Gloucestershire 1804: Meriwether Lewis and William Clark’s expedition commissioned by Thomas Jefferson sets out from St Louis for Pacific Coast 1948: Israel declares independence from British administration Source: Onthisday.com
