1603: Scottish King James VI, son of Mary, Queen of Scots, becomes King James I of England in succession to Elizabeth I, uniting the English and Scottish crowns 1837: Canada grants its Black citizens the right to vote 1882: German scientist Robert Koch discovers and describes the tubercle bacillus, which causes tuberculosis (Mycobacterium tuberculosis), establishing […]
1490: First dated edition of Maimonides’ “Mishneh Torah” is published, a code of Jewish religious law 1775: Patrick Henry proclaims “Give me liberty or give me death” in a speech encouraging Virginia troops to join the American Revolutionary War 1919: 8th Congress of the Russian Communist Party re-establishes a five-member Politburo, which becomes the center […]
1622: First American Indian (Powhatan) massacre of Europeans around Jamestown, Virginia, 347 killed 1765: First direct British tax on American colonists, the Stamp Act, is passed by the British Parliament led by Prime Minister George Grenville 1784: The Emerald Buddha is moved with great ceremony to its current place in Wat Phra Kaew, Thailand 1832: […]
1123: First Council of the Lateran (9th ecumenical council) opens in Rome, agreements of the Concordat of Worms are ratified 1314: Jacques de Molay, the 23rd and last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, is burned at the stake by King Philip IV of France 1325: According to legend, Tenochtitlan is founded on this date […]
432: Saint Patrick, aged about 16, is captured by Irish pirates from his home in Great Britain and taken as a slave to Ireland (traditional date) 1861: Italy is unified into a single kingdom under Victor Emmanuel II following the campaigns led by Giuseppe Garibaldi 1905: Albert Einstein finishes his scientific paper detailing his quantum […]
597 BC: Babylonians capture Jerusalem, replace Jehoiachin with Zedekiah as king 1521: Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan reaches the Philippines, landing on Homonhon Island after crossing the Pacific Ocean 1660: English Long Parliament disbands 1792: King Gustav III of Sweden is shot by Count Jacob Johan Anckarström at a masked ball at the opera and dies […]
44 BC: Julius Caesar is stabbed to death by Brutus, Cassius and several other Roman senators on the Ides of March in Rome 221: Liu Bei, a Chinese warlord and member of the Han royal house, declares himself Emperor of Shu-Han, claiming legitimate succession to the Han Dynasty 1493: Christopher Columbus returns to Spain after his […]
1590: Battle of Ivry: French King Henry IV defeats the Catholic League during the French Wars of Religion 1794: Eli Whitney patents the cotton gin, revolutionizing the cotton industry in the southern US states [1] 1900: Dutch botanist Hugo de Vries rediscovers Gregor Mendel’s laws of heredity and genetics 1900: US currency goes on the […]
624: Battle of Badr: Muhammad’s Muslim forces win a significant victory over the Meccan army 1781: William Herschel sees what he thinks is a “comet” but actually discovers the planet Uranus 1877: American Chester Greenwood patents earmuffs after inventing them at age 15 1884: Siege of Khartoum, Sudan, begins by Mahdist forces and lasts ten months […]
538: Witiges, King of the Ostrogoths, ends his siege of Rome and retreats to Ravenna, leaving the city in the hands of the victorious Byzantine general Belisarius 1455: First record of Johannes Gutenberg’s Bible, a letter dated this day by Enea Silvio Piccolomini refers to the Bible printed a year earlier 1918: Fearing foreign invasion, […]
