Today's anniversaries
August 8: Day of Ashura (Shia Islam, 2022)
- 1264 – Reconquista: In the early stages of the Mudéjar revolt, Muslim rebels captured the alcázar of the city of Jerez in present-day Spain, holding it for about two months.
- 1919 – The Third Anglo-Afghan War ended with the United Kingdom signing a treaty to recognise the independence of the Emirate of Afghanistan.
- 1929 – The German airship Graf Zeppelin (pictured) departed Lakehurst, New Jersey, on a flight to circumnavigate the world.
- 2009 – Nine people died when a tour helicopter and a small private airplane collided over the Hudson River in Hoboken, New Jersey.
- 2014 – The World Health Organization declared the Western African Ebola virus epidemic, which began in December 2013, to be a public health emergency of international concern.
- Earle Page (b. 1880)
- Ernest Lawrence (b. 1901)
- Sheila Varian (b. 1937)
Selected anniversaries for January
January 1: Public Domain Day; Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God (Roman Rite Catholicism)
- 417 – Galla Placidia was forced by her brother Honorius into marriage with his magister militum, Constantius III.
- 1776 – American Revolutionary War: The town of Norfolk, Virginia, was burned and destroyed by the combined actions of British and Whig forces.
- 1945 – Second World War: The Luftwaffe launched Operation Bodenplatte in an attempt to cripple Allied air forces in the Low Countries.
- 1965 – The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, which later helped the country become a republic, was founded.
- 2019 – The NASA space probe New Horizons flew by the trans-Neptunian object Arrokoth (pictured), making it the farthest object visited by a spacecraft.
- Maria Edgeworth (b. 1768)
- Alfred Ely Beach (d. 1896)
- Nay Win Maung (d. 2012)
January 2: Feast day of Saint Gregory of Nazianzus and Saint Basil of Caesarea (Roman Rite Catholicism, Anglicanism)
- 533 – Mercurius, a Roman priest, was elected Pope John II; he was apparently the first pope to adopt a new name upon elevation to the papacy.
- 1680 – Trunajaya rebellion: Amangkurat II of Mataram of Java and his courtiers stabbed Trunajaya to death a week after the rebel leader surrendered to VOC forces.
- 1860 – French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier (pictured) announced the putative discovery of the planet Vulcan at a meeting at the French Academy of Sciences in Paris.
- 1944 – World War II: The United States and Australia successfully landed 13,000 troops in Papua New Guinea in an attempt to cut off a Japanese retreat.
- 1963 – Vietnam War: The Viet Cong won its first major victory at the Battle of Ap Bac.
- Lodomer (d. 1298)
- Tex Rickard (b. 1870)
- Dnyaneshwar Agashe (d. 2009)
- 1521 – Pope Leo X issued Decet Romanum Pontificem, excommunicating Martin Luther for refusing to retract 41 alleged errors found in his 95 Theses and other writings.
- 1888 – The 36-inch (91 cm) refracting telescope (pictured) at the Lick Observatory near San Jose, California, the largest in the world until 1897, was used for the first time.
- 1919 – Emir Faisal of Iraq signed an agreement with Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann on the development of a Jewish homeland in Palestine and an Arab nation in a large part of the Middle East.
- 1976 – The multilateral International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, part of the International Bill of Human Rights, came into effect.
- 2002 – Israeli forces seized MV Karine A, which was carrying 50 tonnes of smuggled weapons on behalf of the Palestinian National Authority.
- William Leslie (d. 1777)
- Cyril Bassett (b. 1892)
- Frenchy Bordagaray (b. 1910)
January 4: Colonial Martyrs Repression Day in Angola (1961)
- 1698 – Most of London's Palace of Whitehall, the main residence of English monarchs since 1530, was destroyed by fire.
- 1885 – Sino-French War: French troops under General Oscar de Négrier defeated a larger Qing Chinese force at the Battle of Núi Bop in northern Vietnam.
- 1948 – Burma achieved independence from the British Empire, with Sao Shwe Thaik as its first president.
- 1972 – Rose Heilbron (pictured) became the first female judge to sit at the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales.
- 2010 – The Burj Khalifa, the world's tallest structure, officially opened in Dubai.
- Moses Mendelssohn (d. 1786)
- Johanna Westerdijk (b. 1883)
- Tom Acker (d. 2021)
January 5: Twelfth Night (Western Christianity)
- 1675 – Franco-Dutch War: French troops defeated Austrian and Brandenburg forces at the Battle of Turckheim in Alsace.
- 1757 – Louis XV of France survived an assassination attempt by Robert-François Damiens, who later became the last person in the country to be executed by being drawn and quartered (depicted).
- 1949 – In his State of the Union speech, U.S. president Harry S. Truman announced: "Every segment of our population, and every individual, has a right to expect from his government a fair deal."
- 2000 – Sri Lankan Tamil politician Kumar Ponnambalam was killed in an assassination suspected to have been sanctioned by President Chandrika Kumaratunga.
- Philippa of England (d. 1430)
- Joseph Erlanger (b. 1874)
- Edmund Herring (d. 1982)
- 1066 – Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon monarch before the Norman Conquest, was crowned King of England.
- 1322 – Stefan Dečanski became King of Serbia, succeeding his half-brother Stefan Konstantin, whom he later defeated in battle.
- 1839 – The worst storm to hit Ireland in 300 years damaged or destroyed more than 20 per cent of houses in Dublin with 100-knot (190 km/h) winds.
- 1907 – Italian educator Maria Montessori (pictured) opened her first school and day-care centre for working-class children in Rome, employing the philosophy of education that now bears her name.
- 1994 – Two-time American Olympic figure-skating medalist Nancy Kerrigan was hit on the leg with a police baton by an assailant hired by the ex-husband of her rival Tonya Harding.
- Baltasar Hidalgo de Cisneros (b. 1756)
- Kahlil Gibran (b. 1883)
- Sybil Plumlee (d. 2012)
January 7: Christmas (Eastern Christianity); Victory over Genocide Day in Cambodia (1979); Tricolour Day in Italy (1797)
- 1610 – Through his telescope, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei made the first observation of Jupiter's Galilean moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, although he was not able to distinguish the first two until the following night.
- 1782 – The Bank of North America opened in Philadelphia as the first de facto central bank of the United States.
- 1931 – Australian aviator Guy Menzies (pictured) flew from Sydney to New Zealand's West Coast, making the first solo trans-Tasman flight.
- 1989 – Representatives of Iranian leader Ruhollah Khomeini delivered a letter to Mikhail Gorbachev, inviting him to consider Islam as an alternative to communism, and predicting the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc.
- 2012 – A hot air balloon flight from Carterton, New Zealand, collided with a power line while landing, causing it to crash and killing all eleven people on board.
- Nicholas Hilliard (d. 1619)
- Elizabeth Louisa Foster Mather (b. 1815)
- Juan Gabriel (b. 1950)
- 1198 – Lotario de Conti was elected as Pope Innocent III; he later worked to restore papal power in Rome.
- 1889 – American statistician Herman Hollerith received a patent for his electromechanical tabulating machine for punched-card data.
- 1936 – Reza Shah issued the Kashf-e hijab decree in Iran, ordering police to physically remove hijabs from any women in public.
- 1972 – Following Pakistan's defeat in the Bangladesh Liberation War, President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto released Bangladeshi politician Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (pictured) from prison in response to international pressure.
- 1991 – Jeremy Wade Delle committed suicide in his high-school class in Richardson, Texas, inspiring the Pearl Jam song "Jeremy".
- Nicholas Biddle (b. 1786)
- Mór Kóczán (b. 1885)
- T. J. Hamblin (d. 2012)
- 1857 – An earthquake registering 7.9 Mw ruptured part of the San Andreas Fault in central and southern California.
- 1917 – First World War: Troops of the British Empire defeated Ottoman forces at the Battle of Rafa on the Sinai–Palestine border in present-day Rafah.
- 1972 – The Los Angeles Lakers of the National Basketball Association lost to the Milwaukee Bucks, ending a 33-game winning streak, the longest of any team in American professional sports.
- 1992 – Radio astronomers Aleksander Wolszczan and Dale Frail announced the discovery of two planets orbiting the pulsar PSR B1257+12 (depicted), generally considered the first definitive detection of an exoplanet.
- 2015 – Contaminated beer served at a funeral in Tete Province, Mozambique, killed 75 people and made at least 230 others ill.
- Demetrios Chalkokondyles (d. 1511)
- John B. Watson (b. 1878)
- Joseph Parker (b. 1992)
January 10: Coming of Age Day in Japan (2022)
- AD 9 – The Western Han dynasty of China ended after the throne was usurped by Wang Mang, who founded the Xin dynasty.
- 1475 – Moldavian–Ottoman Wars: Stephen the Great led Moldavian forces to defeat an Ottoman attack under Hadım Suleiman Pasha near Vaslui in what is now Romania.
- 1863 – Service began on the Metropolitan Railway (construction depicted) between Paddington and Farringdon Street, today the oldest segment of the London Underground.
- 1923 – Lithuanian residents of the Memel Territory rebelled against the League of Nations decision to leave the area as a mandated region under French control.
- 2007 – A general strike began in Guinea as an attempt to force President Lansana Conté to resign, eventually resulting in the appointment of two new prime ministers.
- Georg Forster (d. 1794)
- Issai Schur (b. 1875; d. 1941)
- Yip Pin Xiu (b. 1992)
January 11: Prithvi Jayanti in Nepal (2022); Eugenio María de Hostos's birthday in Puerto Rico
- 1055 – Theodora Porphyrogenita (pictured) became the sole ruler of the Byzantine Empire after the death of her brother-in-law Constantine IX Monomachos.
- 1787 – German-born British astronomer William Herschel discovered two Uranian moons, later named Oberon and Titania by his son John.
- 1863 – American Civil War: The Battle of Arkansas Post concluded with the Union Army capturing a fort near the mouth of the Arkansas River.
- 1923 – Troops from France and Belgium invaded the Ruhr to force the Weimar Republic to pay reparations in the aftermath of World War I.
- 2013 – French special forces failed in an attempted rescue of a DGSE agent, who had been taken hostage in 2009 by al-Shabaab, in Buulo Mareer, Somalia.
- Domenico Ghirlandaio (d. 1494)
- Bayard Taylor (b. 1825)
- Peter Badcoe (b. 1934)
- 1554 – Bayinnaung, who later assembled the largest empire in the history of mainland Southeast Asia, was crowned king of the Burmese Toungoo dynasty.
- 1777 – Mission Santa Clara de Asís (pictured), a Spanish mission in California that formed the basis of both the city of Santa Clara and Santa Clara University, was established by the Franciscans.
- 1918 – An underground explosion at a coal mine in Staffordshire, England, killed 155 men and boys.
- 1964 – Rebels led by John Okello overthrew Sultan Jamshid bin Abdullah, ending 200 years of Arab dominance in Zanzibar.
- 2010 – Iranian physicist Massoud Ali-Mohammadi was assassinated while leaving home for the University of Tehran, where he was a professor.
- Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor (d. 1519)
- Étienne Lenoir (b. 1822)
- Austin Chapman (d. 1926)
January 13: Saint Knut's Day in Finland and Sweden
- 1797 – French Revolutionary Wars: A naval battle off the coast of Brittany between two British frigates and a French ship of the line ended with hundreds of deaths when the latter ran aground.
- 1842 – First Anglo-Afghan War: William Brydon, an assistant surgeon in the British Army, arrived at Jalalabad as the sole European of the 14,000 people retreating from Kabul to evade capture or death.
- 1915 – About 30,000 people were killed when an earthquake struck the Province of L'Aquila in Italy.
- 1972 – Bernice Gera won a sex-discrimination lawsuit against the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, allowing her to become the first female professional baseball umpire.
- 2012 – The Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia ran aground on a reef and capsized (wreck pictured) off Isola del Giglio, Tuscany.
- Lucy Filippini (b. 1672)
- Salmon P. Chase (b. 1808)
- Guido Dessauer (d. 2012)
January 14: Ratification Day in the United States (1784); Revolution and Youth Day in Tunisia (2011)
- 1301 – King Andrew III died without any male heirs, ending the Árpád dynasty, which had ruled Hungary since the late 9th century.
- 1900 – Giacomo Puccini's opera Tosca, based on the play La Tosca by French dramatist Victorien Sardou, premiered at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome.
- 1939 – Norway claimed Queen Maud Land, a 2.7-million km2 (1.0-million sq mi) region of Antarctica, as a dependent territory.
- 1957 – Hindu spiritual leader Kripalu Maharaj (pictured) was named the fifth original jagadguru, meaning 'world teacher'.
- 1973 – Elvis Presley's concert Aloha from Hawaii via Satellite was broadcast live, setting a record as the most watched broadcast by an individual entertainer in television history.
- Mehmed VI (b. 1861)
- James P. Hagerstrom (b. 1921)
- Arfa Karim (d. 2012)
January 15: John Chilembwe Day in Malawi
- 1815 – War of 1812: American frigate USS President, commanded by Commodore Stephen Decatur, was captured by a squadron of four British frigates.
- 1937 – Spanish Civil War: Nationalist and Republican forces both withdrew after suffering heavy losses, ending the Second Battle of the Corunna Road.
- 1947 – The mutilated corpse of the Black Dahlia, a 22-year-old woman whose murder is one of the most famous unsolved crimes in the U.S., was found in Leimert Park, Los Angeles.
- 1962 – The Derveni papyrus (fragment pictured), the oldest surviving manuscript in Europe, was discovered in Macedonia, northern Greece.
- 1975 – Portugal and the nationalist factions UNITA, the MPLA and the FNLA signed the Alvor Agreement, ending the Angolan War of Independence.
- Wilhelm Marx (b. 1863)
- Sylvia Lawler (b. 1922)
- Bo Yibo (d. 2007)
January 16: World Religion Day (2022)
- 1537 – Sir Francis Bigod began an armed rebellion of English Catholics against King Henry VIII and the English Parliament.
- 1780 – Anglo-Spanish War: The Royal Navy gained their first major naval victory over their European enemies in the war when they defeated a Spanish squadron in the Battle of Cape St. Vincent.
- 1905 – Despite being blind in one eye, ice hockey player Frank McGee (pictured) set the record for most goals in a Stanley Cup game when he scored 14 against the Dawson City Nuggets.
- 1942 – TWA Flight 3 crashed into Potosi Mountain in Nevada, killing actress Carole Lombard and all of the other 21 people on board.
- 2016 – After gunmen took hostages the previous night at a restaurant in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, government commandos stormed the premises to bring the situation to an end.
- John C. Breckinridge (b. 1821)
- Osip Brik (b. 1888)
- Lorna Kesterson (d. 2012)
January 17: Tu BiShvat (Judaism, 2022); Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the United States (2022)
- 1562 – Catherine de' Medici, the regent of France, promulgated the Edict of Saint-Germain, providing limited tolerance to the Protestant Huguenots.
- 1899 – The United States took possession of Wake Island in the Pacific Ocean.
- 1912 – Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition reached the South Pole, only to find that Roald Amundsen's team had beaten them by 33 days.
- 1961 – Former Congolese prime minister Patrice Lumumba (pictured) was murdered in circumstances suggesting the support and complicity of the Belgian and US governments and the UN.
- 2002 – Mount Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo began erupting, killing hundreds and leaving about 120,000 people homeless in the nearby town of Goma.
- Henry of Asti (d. 1345)
- Thomas Jaggar (d. 1953)
- Zhao Ziyang (d. 2005)
- 474 – Seven-year-old Leo II became sole Byzantine emperor upon the death of his grandfather Leo I.
- 1535 – Francisco Pizarro founded Ciudad de los Reyes (present-day Lima, Peru) as the capital of the lands he conquered for the Spanish crown.
- 1866 – Wesley College, one of the largest schools in Australia by enrolment, was established in Melbourne.
- 1958 – Willie O'Ree of the Boston Bruins played his first game in the National Hockey League, becoming the first black Canadian who competed in the NHL.
- 1990 – In a sting operation conducted by the FBI, Marion Barry (pictured), the mayor of Washington, D.C., was arrested for possession of crack cocaine.
- Jobst of Moravia (d. 1411)
- Marthinus Nikolaas Ras (b. 1853)
- Vinod Kambli (b. 1972)
- 649 – Conquest of the Western Turks: Kuchean forces surrendered after a siege, establishing Tang control over the northern Tarim Basin in present-day Xinjiang, China.
- 1511 – War of the League of Cambrai: Troops led by Pope Julius II captured Mirandola after a brief siege.
- 1930 – In Watsonville, California, tensions between nativists and Filipino Americans escalated into riots that later spread to other cities in the state.
- 1972 – The French newspaper L'Aurore revealed that the former Nazi SS officer Klaus Barbie (pictured), the "Butcher of Lyon", had been found to be living in Peru.
- 2012 – The Hong Kong–based file-sharing website Megaupload was shut down by the FBI.
- Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (d. 1636)
- Arthur Morris (b. 1922)
- Sarah Burke (d. 2012)
January 20: Day of Nationwide Sorrow in Azerbaijan (1990)
- 1356 – Edward Balliol, whose father John was briefly King of Scotland, gave up his claim to the throne in exchange for an English pension.
- 1877 – The Constantinople Conference concluded with the Great Powers declaring the need for political reforms, which the Ottoman Empire refused to undertake, later resulting in the Russo-Turkish War.
- 1942 – The Holocaust: Reinhard Heydrich and other senior Nazi officials met at the Wannsee Conference near Berlin to discuss the implementation of the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question".
- 1992 – Air Inter Flight 148 crashed into the Vosges while circling to land at Strasbourg Airport, France, resulting in 87 deaths.
- 2009 – In Washington, D.C., more than one million people attended the inauguration of Barack Obama (pictured) as the first African-American president of the United States.
- Wulfstan (d. 1095)
- Carl Linnaeus the Younger (b. 1741)
- Naomi Parker Fraley (d. 2018)
- 763 – The Abbasid Caliphate crushed the Alid revolt when a rebel leader was mortally wounded in battle near Basra in present-day Iraq.
- 1789 – The Power of Sympathy by William Hill Brown, widely considered to be the first American novel, was published.
- 1919 – The First Dáil (members pictured) convened at the Mansion House in Dublin and adopted a declaration of independence calling for the establishment of the Irish Republic.
- 1972 – Tripura, formerly part of the independent Twipra Kingdom, became a state of India.
- 2017 – An estimated five million people participated in the worldwide Women's March, to advocate for legislation and policies on human rights and other issues.
- Theodor Fliedner (b. 1800)
- Edith Tolkien (b. 1889)
- Vincent Lingiari (d. 1988)
January 22: Day of Unity of Ukraine (1919)
- 1506 – The first contingent of 150 Swiss Guards (example depicted) arrived in Rome to provide security for the pope.
- 1689 – The Convention Parliament met to decide the fate of the throne after James II, the last Catholic monarch of England, fled to France following the Glorious Revolution.
- 1906 – SS Valencia was wrecked off the coast of Vancouver Island, Canada, in a location so treacherous it was known as the Graveyard of the Pacific.
- 1987 – After being convicted of receiving bribes, Pennsylvania state treasurer R. Budd Dwyer shot and killed himself in front of television cameras during a press conference.
- 2012 – Croatia held a referendum, in which it voted to become a member of the European Union.
- Edward Seymour, 1st Duke of Somerset (d. 1552)
- Frigyes Riesz (b. 1880)
- Pope Benedict XV (d. 1922)
- 1556 – One of the deadliest earthquakes in history struck Shaanxi, China, resulting in at least 100,000 direct deaths.
- 1849 – Elizabeth Blackwell (pictured) graduated from Geneva Medical College in New York, making her the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States.
- 1909 – Two men committed an armed robbery in Tottenham, London, and led police on a two-hour chase, partially by tram, that ended in the perpetrators' suicides.
- 1942 – World War II: Japan began an invasion of the island of New Britain in the Australian Territory of New Guinea.
- 2002 – American journalist Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and later murdered by al-Qaeda agents in Karachi, Pakistan.
- Hai Rui (b. 1514)
- Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama (b. 1880)
- Salvador Dalí (d. 1989)
January 24: Mother's Day in Iran (2022): Day of the Unification of the Romanian Principalities in Romania
- AD 41 – Cassius Chaerea and disgruntled Praetorian Guards murdered the Roman emperor Caligula, replacing him with his uncle Claudius.
- 1857 – The University of Calcutta (pictured), the first modern university in the Indian subcontinent, was established.
- 1915 – First World War: British ships of the Grand Fleet intercepted and surprised a German High Seas Fleet squadron in the North Sea, sinking a cruiser and damaging several other vessels.
- 1966 – Air India Flight 101, en route to London from Bombay, crashed into Mont Blanc in France, killing all 117 people on board.
- 1989 – American serial killer Ted Bundy was executed by electric chair in Florida for the murders of 30 young women.
- George Rooke (d. 1709)
- Signe Rink (b. 1836)
- Mary Lou Retton (b. 1968)
January 25: Feast day of Saint Gregory of Nazianzus (Eastern Orthodoxy) and Dwynwen (Wales)
- 1704 – English colonists from the Province of Carolina and their native allies began a series of raids against the largely peaceful population of Apalachee in Spanish Florida.
- 1792 – Thomas Hardy founded the London Corresponding Society to seek a "radical reform of parliament", later influencing the reform movements of early-19th-century England.
- 1917 – Serving as an armed merchant cruiser, HMS Laurentic (depicted in merchant service) was sunk by German mines off the northern coast of Ireland, resulting in 354 deaths.
- 1967 – South Vietnamese junta leader Nguyễn Cao Kỳ fired rival Nguyễn Hữu Có while the latter was overseas on a diplomatic visit.
- 1995 – A team of Norwegian and American scientists launched a Black Brant XII sounding rocket, which was mistaken for a Trident missile by Russian forces.
- Mihrimah Sultan (d. 1578)
- John Fisher, 1st Baron Fisher (b. 1841)
- Mikhail Suslov (d. 1982)
January 26: Australia Day (1788); Republic Day in India (1950)
- 661 – Ali, the fourth Islamic caliph, was assassinated, effectively ending the Rashidun Caliphate.
- 1700 – An earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 9.0 occurred off the Pacific Northwest coast of North America, as evidenced by Japanese records of tsunamis.
- 1905 – The 3,107-carat (621 g; 1.37 lb) Cullinan Diamond (pictured), the largest gem-quality rough diamond ever found, was discovered at the Premier Mine in Gauteng, South Africa.
- 1952 – Spontaneous anti-British riots erupted in Cairo following the killings of 50 Egyptian auxiliary police officers the previous day.
- 1972 – JAT Flight 367 exploded in mid-air over Czechoslovakia; the only survivor of the 28 on board, flight attendant Vesna Vulović, fell 10,160 m (33,330 ft), setting the record for surviving the highest fall without a parachute.
- Manuel do Cenáculo (d. 1814)
- Seán MacBride (b. 1904)
- Suleman octuplets (b. 2009)
- 945 – Brothers Stephen and Constantine Lekapenos, having deposed their father as Byzantine emperor a few weeks earlier, were themselves overthrown by Constantine VII, their co-emperor.
- 1820 – A Russian expedition led by naval officers Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Lazarev made the first sighting of the coast of Antarctica.
- 1945 – The Soviet Red Army liberated about 7,000 prisoners left behind by the Nazis in Auschwitz concentration camp (entrance pictured), in present-day Oświęcim, Poland.
- 1974 – Brisbane, Australia, was flooded when the Brisbane River broke its banks.
- 2003 – The first selections for the United States National Recording Registry were announced by the Library of Congress.
- Marcian (d. 457)
- Titumir (b. 1782)
- Perfecto Yasay Jr. (b. 1947)
- 1393 – King Charles VI of France was nearly killed when several dancers' costumes caught fire during a masquerade ball.
- 1547 – Nine-year-old Edward VI, the first English monarch to be raised as a Protestant, became king.
- 1813 – English author Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice was published, using material from an unpublished manuscript originally written between 1796 and 1797.
- 1922 – The largest recorded snowstorm in the history of Washington, D.C., collapsed the Knickerbocker Theatre (damage pictured), killing 98 people.
- 1984 – Tropical Storm Domoina made landfall in southern Mozambique, causing some of the most severe flooding recorded in the region.
- Joan II of Navarre (b. 1312)
- Johannes Hevelius (b. 1611; d. 1687)
- Reynaldo Hahn (d. 1947)
- 904 – Sergius III (pictured), whose pontificate was marked by feudal violence and disorder in central Italy, came out of retirement to take over the papacy from the deposed antipope Christopher.
- 1863 – American Indian Wars: The U.S. Army led by Patrick Edward Connor massacred Chief Bear Hunter and Shoshone forces at the Bear River Massacre in present-day Franklin County, Idaho.
- 1911 – Mexican Revolution: The Magonista rebellion began when Mexican Liberal Party troops captured the town of Mexicali.
- 1959 – The first Melodifestivalen, an annual Swedish music competition that determines the country's representative for the Eurovision Song Contest, was held in Stockholm.
- 2017 – A lone gunman carried out a mass shooting at a mosque in Quebec City, Canada, killing six people and injuring nineteen others.
- Philippe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé (d. 1871)
- Alice Catherine Evans (b. 1881)
- Aminah Cendrakasih (b. 1938)
January 30: Martyrs' Day in India (1948)
- 1607 – Low-lying places around the coasts of the Bristol Channel of Britain were flooded, resulting in an estimated 2,000 deaths.
- 1835 – Richard Lawrence became the first person to attempt to assassinate a sitting US president when he failed to kill Andrew Jackson at the US Capitol (assassination attempt pictured) and was subdued by the crowd.
- 1939 – In a speech to the Reichstag, Adolf Hitler threatened the "annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe".
- 1972 – The Troubles: On Bloody Sunday, members of the British Parachute Regiment shot 26 civil-rights protesters in Derry, Northern Ireland, killing at least 13 people.
- William More (b. 1520)
- Angela of the Cross (b. 1846)
- Abdullah II of Jordan (b. 1962)
January 31: Independence Day in Nauru (1968)
- 1208 – King Sverker II of Sweden was defeated at the Battle of Lena by Eric Knutsson, who succeeded to the throne.
- 1578 – Eighty Years' War: Spain won a crushing victory at the Battle of Gembloux, which led to a breakup of the Seventeen Provinces into the Catholic Union of Arras and the Protestant Union of Utrecht.
- 1957 – A DC-7B operated by Douglas Aircraft collided in mid-air with a U.S. Air Force F-89 and crashed into a schoolyard in Pacoima, California.
- 1988 – Doug Williams (pictured) became the first African-American quarterback to play in a Super Bowl, leading the Washington Redskins to victory in Super Bowl XXII.
- 2010 – James Cameron's Avatar became the first film to earn over US$2 billion worldwide.
- James Stanley, 7th Earl of Derby (b. 1607)
- Manuel Alberti (d. 1811)
- Eleanor Holm (d. 2004)
Selected anniversaries / On this day archive
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Selected anniversaries for February
February 1: Feast day of Saint Brigid of Kildare (Western Christianity); the Fajr decade begins in Iran; Black History Month begins in North America
- 1327 – Fourteen-year-old Edward III was crowned King of England, but with the country ruled by his mother Queen Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer.
- 1662 – Sino-Dutch conflicts: The Dutch East India Company's rule in Taiwan ended after a siege by the Ming loyalist Koxinga, who established the Kingdom of Tungning on the island.
- 1942 – Voice of America, the official external radio and television service of the United States federal government, began broadcasting with programs aimed at Axis-controlled areas during World War II.
- 1972 – Kuala Lumpur (pictured), the capital of Malaysia, became the first settlement in the country to be granted city status since independence.
- 2012 – Following an Egyptian Premier League match in Port Said, Al Masry fans rioted and violently attacked Al Ahly supporters, resulting in 74 deaths.
- Alexios I of Trebizond (d. 1222)
- Clara Butt (b. 1872)
- Hassan Al-Turabi (b. 1932)
February 2: Candlemas (Western Christianity); Groundhog Day in Canada and the United States
- 506 – Alaric II, King of the Visigoths, promulgated a collection of Roman law known as the Breviary of Alaric.
- 1659 – Jan van Riebeeck, the founder of Cape Town, produced the first bottle of South African wine (vineyard pictured).
- 1913 – New York City's Grand Central Terminal, the world's largest train station by number of platforms, opened immediately after midnight.
- 1942 – The first act of the Norwegian resistance movement took place with the bombing of Oslo East Station by the Osvald Group to protest the inauguration of Vidkun Quisling.
- 2009 – Omid, Iran's first domestically made satellite, was successfully launched from Semnan Space Center.
- Alix Le Clerc (b. 1576)
- José Guadalupe Posada (b. 1852)
- Alfred Delp (d. 1945)
February 3: Feast day of Saint Laurence of Canterbury (Western Christianity); Four Chaplains' Day in the United States (1943)
- 1266 – Mudéjar revolt: King James I of Aragon entered the Muslim-held city of Murcia (depicted), conquered following its surrender three days earlier.
- 1852 – The Argentine Confederation was defeated in the Platine War by an alliance consisting of Brazil, Uruguay and the Argentine provinces of Entre Ríos and Corrientes.
- 1918 – At 11,675 ft (3,559 m) long, the Twin Peaks Tunnel in San Francisco opened as the longest streetcar tunnel in the world at the time.
- 2010 – An edition of L'Homme qui marche I, a bronze sculpture by Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, was sold for £65 million, setting the record for the most expensive sculpture sold at auction.
- Horace Greeley (b. 1811)
- Tatyana Velikanova (b. 1932)
- C. N. Annadurai (d. 1969)
- 960 – Emperor Taizu (pictured) came to power, initiating the Song dynasty of China that eventually lasted for more than three centuries.
- 1797 – The Riobamba earthquake, the most powerful in Ecuador's history, devastated Riobamba and many other cities, causing at least 6,000 casualties.
- 1820 – Chilean War of Independence: Chilean forces captured the city of Valdivia and its harbour, depriving the Spanish Empire of an important naval base.
- 1899 – The Philippine–American War began when an American soldier, under orders to keep insurgents away from his unit's encampment, fired on a Filipino soldier in Manila.
- 2015 – Shortly after takeoff from Taipei Songshan Airport, the crew of TransAsia Airways Flight 235 shut down the wrong engine in response to a flameout, leading to a crash that resulted in 43 deaths.
- Ceolnoth (d. 870)
- Carl Michael Bellman (b. 1740)
- Jenny Shipley (b. 1952)
- 1637 – Ninety-eight sales for rare tulip bulbs were recorded on the last day of tulip mania, a speculative bubble in the Dutch Republic.
- 1818 – Charles XIV John (pictured) succeeded to the thrones of Sweden and Norway as the first monarch of the House of Bernadotte.
- 1861 – In a speech before the U.S. Congress, Representative John Edward Bouligny refused to join his fellow Louisiana congressmen in heeding the state's secession convention and resigning.
- 1913 – Greek military aviators Michael Moutoussis and Aristeidis Moraitinis performed the first naval air mission in history, with a Farman MF.7 hydroplane.
- 2004 – At least 21 cockle-gatherers were drowned by an incoming tide in Morecambe Bay, England, prompting the establishment of the British government's Gangmasters Licensing Authority.
- Philipp Spener (d. 1705)
- William Cullen (d. 1790)
- Neymar (b. 1992)
February 6: Sámi National Day (1917); Waitangi Day in New Zealand (1840)
- 1820 – The first ship of the American Colonization Society departed from New York for West Africa with 88 African-American emigrants aboard to found the colony of Liberia.
- 1840 – British representatives and Māori chiefs first signed the Treaty of Waitangi, widely regarded to be the founding document of New Zealand.
- 1952 – Elizabeth II (pictured) became the queen regnant of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Pakistan, and Ceylon upon the death of her father, King George VI.
- 1976 – Lockheed Corporation president Carl Kotchian admitted that the company had paid out approximately US$3 million in bribes to the office of Japanese prime minister Kakuei Tanaka.
- 2018 – The SpaceX launch vehicle Falcon Heavy made its maiden flight.
- Thurstan (d. 1140)
- Bernard of Corleone (b. 1605)
- Axl Rose (b. 1962)
February 7: Constitution Day in Mexico (2022)
- 457 – Leo I (pictured), who ruled for nearly 20 years, was crowned Byzantine emperor.
- 1813 – Napoleonic Wars: Two evenly matched French and British frigates fought for four hours at the Îles de Los off the Guinean coast, resulting in a stalemate.
- 1900 – A Chinese immigrant in San Francisco fell ill with the bubonic plague in the first epidemic of the disease in the continental United States.
- 1941 – Soviet border guards opened fire on civilians attempting to cross the border from the Soviet Union to Romania near Lunca, killing several hundred people.
- 1992 – The Maastricht Treaty, which led to the formation of the European Union, was signed by the member states of the European Communities.
- 1997 – Steve Jobs returned to Apple Inc. as a consultant after the company's acquisition of his technology startup NeXT.
- Azar Bigdeli (b. 1722)
- Louisa Jane Hall (b. 1802)
- Eddie Izzard (b. 1962)
- 1601 – Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, led a failed rebellion against Queen Elizabeth I of England.
- 1879 – Angered by a controversial umpiring decision, cricket spectators rioted and attacked the England team during a match in Sydney, Australia.
- 1910 – William D. Boyce (pictured) established the Boy Scouts of America, expanding the Scout Movement into the United States.
- 1965 – After taking evasive action to avoid a mid-air collision just after taking off from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport, Eastern Air Lines Flight 663 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 84 people on board.
- 2010 – A freak storm triggered a series of avalanches that buried more than 3.5 km (2.2 mi) of road near the Salang Tunnel in Afghanistan, killing 175 people and trapping more than 2,500 travellers.
- Helen of Anjou (d. 1314)
- Kate Chopin (b. 1850)
- Peter Kropotkin (d. 1921)
- 1234 – The Jin dynasty capital of Caizhou was captured by Mongols and their Song allies, bringing an end to Jurchen rule.
- 1855 – A series of hoof-like marks in the snow continuing through the countryside for some 40 to 100 miles (60 to 160 km) were discovered in Devon, England.
- 1913 – A meteor procession was visible across much of eastern North and South America, leading astronomers to conclude that its source was a small, short-lived natural satellite of the Earth.
- 1964 – As Beatlemania swept the U.S., the Beatles (pictured) made their first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show before a record-breaking audience, beginning a musical phenomenon known as the British Invasion.
- 1976 – The Australian Defence Force was formed by the integration of the Australian Army, the Royal Australian Navy, and the Royal Australian Air Force.
- Minamoto no Yoritomo (d. 1199)
- Gerhard Richter (b. 1932)
- Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon (d. 2002)
February 10: Saint Scholastica's Day (Christianity); National Memorial Day of the Exiles and Foibe in Italy (1947)
- 1712 – Huilliches in Chile's Chiloé Archipelago rose up against Spanish encomenderos as vengeance for perceived injustices.
- 1763 – Britain, France, and Spain signed the Treaty of Paris to end the Seven Years' War, significantly reducing the size of the French colonial empire while at the same time marking the beginning of an extensive period of British dominance outside of Europe.
- 1906 – The Royal Navy battleship HMS Dreadnought was launched, representing such a marked advance in naval technology that her name came to be associated with an entire generation of battleships.
- 1962 – The first solo exhibition by Roy Lichtenstein (pictured) opened, and it included Look Mickey, which featured his first employment of Ben Day dots, speech balloons, and comic imagery sourcing.
- Robert Garran (b. 1867)
- Árpád Göncz (b. 1922)
- Lilly King (b. 1997)
February 11: Anniversary of the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1979); National Foundation Day in Japan (660 BC)
from La fille du régiment
- 1584 – Spanish explorer Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa founded the town of Nombre de Jesús, the first of two short-lived colonies at the Strait of Magellan.
- 1823 – About 110 boys were killed in a human crush at the Convent of the Minori Osservanti in Valletta on the last day of the Maltese Carnival.
- 1840 – La fille du régiment (audio featured), an opéra comique by Gaetano Donizetti, premiered in Paris to highly negative reviews but later became a success.
- 1919 – Friedrich Ebert was elected the provisional president of Germany by the Weimar National Assembly.
- 2008 – Rebel East Timorese soldiers invaded the homes of President José Ramos-Horta and Prime Minister Xanana Gusmão, seriously wounding the former.
- René Descartes (d. 1650)
- Elizabeth Siddal (d. 1862)
- Whitney Houston (d. 2012)
- 1502 – Queen Isabella I issued an edict outlawing Islam in the Crown of Castile, forcing virtually all her Muslim subjects to convert to Christianity.
- 1855 – The precursor of Michigan State University in East Lansing was founded as the United States' first agricultural college.
- 1947 – The French fashion company Dior unveiled its New Look collection (suit pictured), which revolutionized women's dress and re-established Paris as the centre of the fashion world after World War II.
- 1968 – Vietnam War: Unarmed citizens in the villages of Phong Nhị and Phong Nhất were massacred, allegedly by South Korean Marines.
- 2016 – In the first meeting between the leaders of the Catholic Church and the Russian Orthodox Church, Pope Francis and Patriarch Kirill of Moscow signed the Havana Declaration at José Martí International Airport in Cuba.
- Lord Guildford Dudley (d. 1554)
- Alice Roosevelt Longworth (b. 1884)
- Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat (d. 2015)
- 1692 – Members of Clan MacDonald of Glencoe in the Scottish Highlands were massacred, allegedly for failing to pledge allegiance to the new monarchs, William III and Mary II.
- 1867 – Work began on the covering of the Senne (pictured), burying the polluted main river of Brussels to allow for urban renewal in the centre of the city.
- 1945 – World War II: The Allies began a strategic bombing of Dresden, Germany, resulting in a lethal firestorm that killed tens of thousands of civilians.
- 1978 – A bomb exploded outside the Hilton Hotel in Sydney, the site of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, killing three people and injuring eleven others.
- 2012 – The first Vega rocket was launched by the European Space Agency.
- Béla II of Hungary (d. 1141)
- Sarojini Naidu (b. 1879)
- Waylon Jennings (d. 2002)
- 1804 – Serb chieftans elected Đorđe Petrović as their leader, and began an uprising against the Ottoman Empire.
- 1852 – The Hospital for Sick Children (pictured), the first hospital in England to provide in-patient beds specifically for children, was founded in London.
- 1924 – The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company was renamed to International Business Machines, which grew into one of the world's largest companies by market capitalization.
- 1989 – Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa calling for the death of Salman Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses, a novel considered to be blasphemous by some Muslims.
- Domenico Ferrabosco (b. 1513)
- William Blackstone (d. 1780)
- Adnan Saidi (d. 1942)
February 15: National Flag of Canada Day (1965); Statehood Day in Serbia (1804)
- 1113 – Pope Paschal II issued the papal bull Pie postulatio voluntatis, formally recognising the establishment of the Knights Hospitaller.
- 1493 – Christopher Columbus wrote a letter, which was widely distributed upon his return to Portugal, announcing the results of his first voyage to the Americas.
- 1900 – Second Boer War: British cavalry led by John French defeated Boer forces to end a 124-day siege of Kimberley in present-day South Africa.
- 1942 – Second World War: Japanese forces led by General Tomoyuki Yamashita captured Singapore, with the largest surrender of British-led military personnel in history (pictured).
- 2012 – The world's deadliest prison fire took place at the National Penitentiary at Comayagua, Honduras, killing 361 people.
- Ibn Tabataba (d. 815)
- V. A. Urechia (b. 1834)
- Roger B. Chaffee (b. 1935)
February 16: Day of the Shining Star in North Korea; Elizabeth Peratrovich Day in Alaska
![Painting of Philadelphia burning by Edward Moran](https://web.archive.org/web/20220808224603im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a2/Burning_of_the_uss_philadelphia.jpg/115px-Burning_of_the_uss_philadelphia.jpg)
- 1804 – First Barbary War: Lieutenant Stephen Decatur led a U.S. Navy raid to destroy the captured USS Philadelphia in the harbor of Tripoli (depicted), denying her use to the Barbary States.
- 1859 – The French government passed a law setting the musical note A4 to a frequency of 435 hertz, in the first attempt to standardize concert pitch.
- 1923 – English Egyptologist and archaeologist Howard Carter unsealed Tutankhamun's tomb, KV62, in the Valley of the Kings.
- 1959 – Fidel Castro was sworn in as Prime Minister of Cuba, beginning his decades-long rule over the country.
- 2013 – At least 91 people were killed and 190 others injured after a bomb hidden in a water tank exploded at a market in Hazara Town, Pakistan.
- Henry Raspe (d. 1247)
- Henry Wilson (b. 1812)
- Heinz-Wolfgang Schnaufer (b. 1922)
- 1814 – War of the Sixth Coalition: Napoleon led a French army to a crushing victory in the Battle of Mormant, nearly destroying a Russian division.
- 1894 – Rudolf Diesel's first working diesel engine ran for one minute.
- 1944 – World War II: The U.S. Navy began Operation Hailstone, a massive naval air and surface attack against the Japanese naval and air base at Truk in the Caroline Islands.
- 1959 – Vanguard 2 (model pictured), the first weather satellite, was launched to measure cloud cover distribution.
- 2006 – A massive landslide in the Philippine province of Southern Leyte killed over 1,000 people.
- Denzil Holles, 1st Baron Holles (d. 1680)
- Margot Heuman (b. 1928)
- Nestor Chylak (d. 1982)
- 1766 – Malagasy captives on the VOC slave ship Meermin began a mutiny that led to the ship's destruction on Cape Agulhas in present-day South Africa and the recapture of the instigators.
- 1942 – World War II: The Imperial Japanese Army began the systematic extermination of perceived hostile elements among Chinese Singaporeans.
- 1977 – NASA's first Space Shuttle, Enterprise, made its first test flight on top of the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (both pictured).
- 2007 – Terrorist bombs exploded on a Samjhauta Express train in Panipat, India, killing 68 people.
- Michelangelo (d. 1564)
- George Henschel (b. 1850)
- Sergo Ordzhonikidze (d. 1937)
- 1600 – The stratovolcano Huaynaputina, in present-day Peru, produced the largest recorded volcanic explosion in South America.
- 1674 – Charles II of England signed the Treaty of Westminster to end the Third Anglo-Dutch War, confirming English and Dutch sovereignty over New Netherland and Surinam, respectively.
- 1942 – Second World War: In the largest attack mounted by a foreign power against Australia, more than 240 Japanese aircraft bombed Darwin, Northern Territory (pictured).
- 2012 – Forty-four inmates died during a riot at a prison in Apodaca, Mexico.
- Thomas Arundel (d. 1414)
- Émilie Gamelin (b. 1800)
- Sylvia Rivera (d. 2002)
- 1816 – Italian composer Gioachino Rossini's opera buffa The Barber of Seville premiered at the Teatro Argentina in Rome to jeers from the audience.
- 1872 – The Metropolitan Museum of Art (pictured), today the largest art museum in the United States with a collection of more than two million works, opened in New York.
- 1931 – Paraguayan anarchists briefly seized the city of Encarnación as part of a larger plan to initiate a social revolution in the country.
- 1992 – Appearing on the talk show Larry King Live, U.S. industrialist Ross Perot announced that he would begin a presidential campaign if "ordinary people" wanted him to run for office.
- Laura Bassi (d. 1778)
- Ansel Adams (b. 1902)
- Maria Goeppert Mayer (d. 1972)
February 21: Language Movement Day in Bangladesh (1952); Family Day in Canada (2022); Washington's Birthday / Presidents' Day in the United States (2022)
- 1437 – King James I of Scotland was murdered at Perth in a failed coup by his uncle and former ally Walter Stewart, Earl of Atholl.
- 1866 – Lucy Hobbs Taylor (pictured) became the first woman to receive a doctorate from a dental college.
- 1929 – In the first battle of the Warlord Rebellion in northeastern Shandong against the Nationalist government of China, a 24,000-strong rebel force led by Zhang Zongchang was defeated at Zhifu by 7,000 NRA troops.
- 1952 – A number of student protesters demanding the establishment of Bengali as an official language were killed by police in Dhaka, East Pakistan.
- Raimondo Montecuccoli (b. 1609)
- Goscombe John (b. 1860)
- Helen Hooven Santmyer (d. 1986)
- 1316 – The Catalan forces of Ferdinand of Majorca defeated troops loyal to Princess Matilda of Hainaut at the Battle of Picotin on the Peloponnese peninsula in modern-day Greece.
- 1909 – The sixteen United States Navy battleships of the Great White Fleet, led by Connecticut (pictured), completed a circumnavigation of the globe.
- 1997 – Scientists at the Roslin Institute in Scotland announced the existence of Dolly, a female sheep who was the first mammal to have successfully been cloned from an adult cell.
- 2006 – At least six men staged the largest cash robbery in Britain at a Securitas depot in Tonbridge, Kent, United Kingdom.
- August Bebel (b. 1840)
- Saufatu Sopoanga (b. 1952)
- Chuck Jones (d. 2002)
February 23: The Emperor's Birthday in Japan (1960)
- 1739 – The identity of English highwayman Dick Turpin was uncovered by his former schoolmate, who recognised his handwriting, leading to Turpin's trial.
- 1847 – Mexican–American War: The United States Army used artillery to repulse the much larger Mexican army at the Battle of Buena Vista near Saltillo.
- 1941 – Plutonium was first chemically identified by chemist Glenn T. Seaborg and his team at the University of California, Berkeley.
- 1945 – American photographer Joe Rosenthal took the Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima (pictured) during the Battle of Iwo Jima, an image that was later reproduced on the Marine Corps War Memorial.
- 2017 – Syrian civil war: Allied troops led by the Turkish Armed Forces captured the city of al-Bab from the Islamic State.
- Pope Paul II (b. 1417)
- George Taylor (d. 1781)
- James Herriot (d. 1995)
February 24: Fat Thursday (Western Christianity, 2022); Independence Day in Estonia (1918)
- 1525 – A Habsburg army defeated French forces at the Battle of Pavia, the decisive engagement of the Italian War of 1521–1526.
- 1720 – War of the Quadruple Alliance: Spanish forces began a failed assault on the British settlement of Nassau in the Bahamas.
- 1809 – After having stood for only 15 years, London's Theatre Royal, Drury Lane (pictured), the third building of that name, burned down.
- 1968 – Vietnam War: South Vietnamese forces led by Ngô Quang Trưởng recaptured the citadel of Huế.
- 1978 – Five men disappeared after attending a college basketball game in Chico, California; the bodies of four of them were discovered four months later.
- Edmund Andros (d. 1714)
- Carlo Buonaparte (d. 1785)
- Risa Hontiveros (b. 1966)
February 25: Soviet Occupation Day in Georgia (1921); National Day in Kuwait (1961)
- 628 – Khosrow II, the last great king of the Sasanian Empire, was overthrown by his son Kavad II.
- 1866 – Miners in Calaveras County, California, discovered a human skull that a prominent geologist claimed was proof (later disproved) that humans had existed during the Pliocene.
- 1948 – Fearful of civil war and Soviet intervention in recent unrest, President Edvard Beneš (pictured) ceded control of the government to the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.
- 1956 – In a speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev denounced the personality cult and dictatorship of his predecessor Joseph Stalin.
- 1992 – First Nagorno-Karabakh War: Armenian armed forces killed at least 161 ethnic Azerbaijani civilians in the Nagorno-Karabakh village of Khojaly.
- Sharafkhan Bidlisi (b. 1543)
- S. O. Davies (d. 1972)
- Yi Han-yong (d. 1997)
- 1606 – Dutch explorer Willem Janszoon made the first recorded European landing in Australia, although he believed that he was on New Guinea.
- 1815 – Napoleon escaped from the Italian island of Elba (depicted), to which he had been exiled after the signing of the Treaty of Fontainebleau.
- 1917 – The Original Dixieland Jass Band recorded "Livery Stable Blues", the first jazz single ever released.
- 1935 – With the aid of a radio station in Daventry, England, and two receiving antennae, Scottish engineer and inventor Robert Watson-Watt first demonstrated the use of radar.
- 2012 – African-American teenager Trayvon Martin was killed by neighborhood-watch coordinator George Zimmerman in Sanford, Florida, prompting a nationwide controversy.
- Manfred, King of Sicily (d. 1266)
- Camille Flammarion (b. 1842)
- Raosaheb Gogte (d. 2000)
February 27: Feast day of Saint Gregory of Narek (Catholicism)
- 380 – Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire as a consequence of the Edict of Thessalonica.
- 1560 – The Treaty of Berwick was signed, setting the terms under which an English fleet and army could enter Scotland to expel French troops defending the regency of Mary of Guise (pictured).
- 1962 – Two dissident Republic of Vietnam Air Force pilots bombed the Independence Palace in Saigon in a failed attempt to assassinate President Ngo Dinh Diem.
- 1982 – The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, known for its performances of Gilbert and Sullivan's Savoy operas, gave its final performance.
- 2002 – Violent riots, perceived to have been instigated by a train fire that killed 59 Hindu pilgrims, broke out in the Indian state of Gujarat, killing at least 1,000 people, mostly Muslims, over three days.
- Pietro Gnocchi (b. 1689)
- Ellen Terry (b. 1847)
- Tina Strobos (d. 2012)
February 28: Shrove Monday (Western Christianity, 2022); Kalevala Day / Finnish Culture Day
- 1638 – The National Covenant was formally adopted in opposition to proposed reforms to the Church of Scotland by King Charles I.
- 1897 – Ranavalona III, the last sovereign ruler of the Kingdom of Madagascar, was deposed by French military forces.
- 1928 – Indian physicist C. V. Raman and his colleagues discovered what is now known as Raman scattering, for which he later became the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Physics.
- 1947 – Nationalist soldiers fired on protesters in Taipei (crowd pictured), triggering widespread uprisings and the violent suppression in the Taiwanese White Terror.
- 1975 – A London Underground train at Moorgate station failed to stop at the terminal Moorgate station, crashing and causing the deaths of 43 people .
- Cornelius Gemma (b. 1535)
- Pierre Fatou (b. 1878)
- Yaşar Kemal (d. 2015)
- 1704 – Queen Anne's War: French and Native American forces raided the English settlement of Deerfield, Massachusetts, killing more than 50 colonists.
- 1768 – A group of Polish nobles established the Bar Confederation to defend the internal and external independence of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth against Russian influence and King Stanisław II Augustus (portrait shown).
- 1960 – The deadliest earthquake in Moroccan history struck the city of Agadir, killing at least 12,000 people.
- 1980 – La Bougie du Sapeur, a humorous French newspaper that is published only on leap days, printed its first issue.
- 2008 – Belgian author Misha Defonseca admitted that her bestselling memoir about surviving the Holocaust was in fact a literary forgery.
Oswald of Worcester (d. 992) · Ina Coolbrith (d. 1928) · Pedro Sánchez (b. 1972)
Selected anniversaries / On this day archive
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Selected anniversaries for March
March 1: Disability Day of Mourning; Shrove Tuesday / Mardi Gras (Western Christianity, 2022); Independence Day in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992); Saint David's Day in Wales; Yap Day in Yap State, Federated States of Micronesia
- 1562 – An attempt by Francis, Duke of Guise, to disperse a church service by Huguenots in Wassy, France, turned into a massacre, resulting in 50 dead, and starting the French Wars of Religion.
- 1872 – Yellowstone National Park (bison pictured), located mostly in the present-day U.S. state of Wyoming, was established as the world's first national park.
- 1944 – World War II: American and Australian troops won the Battle of Sio in New Guinea.
- 2008 – The Armenian military and national police attacked a crowd of people protesting the results of the recent election in Yerevan, leading to 10 deaths and over 100 arrests.
- George Wishart (d. 1546)
- Théophile Delcassé (b. 1852)
- Robert Bork (b. 1927)
March 2: Ash Wednesday (Western Christianity, 2022); the Nineteen-Day Fast begins (Baháʼí Faith, 2022)
- 1444 – The League of Lezhë, an alliance of regional chieftains, was established in Venetian Albania with Skanderbeg as their commander.
- 1859 – The Great Slave Auction, the largest single sale of slaves in U.S. history, with more than 400 people sold, began in Georgia.
- 1919 – Communist, revolutionary-socialist, and syndicalist delegates met in Moscow to establish the Communist International.
- 1962 – Led by General Ne Win, the Burmese military seized power in a coup d'état.
- 1978 – As a cosmonaut on Soyuz 28, Czechoslovak military pilot Vladimír Remek (pictured) became the first person from outside the Soviet Union or the United States to go into space.
- Pope Adrian VI (b. 1459)
- James A. Gilmore (b. 1876)
- Lionel Matthews (d. 1944)
March 3: Liberation Day in Bulgaria (1878); Hinamatsuri in Japan
- 1776 – American Revolutionary War: Samuel Nicholas and the Continental Marines successfully landed on New Providence in the Bahamas and began a raid of Nassau, capturing the port the next day.
- 1875 – French composer Georges Bizet's opera Carmen (poster pictured), based on the novella of the same title by Prosper Mérimée, premiered at the Opéra-Comique in Paris.
- 1945 – Second World War: The Royal Air Force mistakenly bombed the neighbourhood of Bezuidenhout in The Hague, killing 511 evacuees.
- 1972 – The British rock band Jethro Tull released Thick as a Brick, a parody concept album allegedly adapted from an eight-year-old boy's epic poem.
- 2012 – Two passenger trains collided near Szczekociny, Poland, resulting in 16 deaths and 58 injuries.
- Michael Kantakouzenos Şeytanoğlu (d. 1578)
- Ghulam Kadir (d. 1789)
- Tolu Ogunlesi (b. 1982)
March 4: Feast day of Saint Casimir (Catholicism)
- 1675 – John Flamsteed (pictured) was appointed the first Astronomer Royal by King Charles II of England.
- 1804 – Irish convicts formerly involved at the Battle of Vinegar Hill during the Irish Rebellion of 1798 began an uprising against British colonial authorities in New South Wales, Australia.
- 1837 – Chicago, Illinois, was incorporated as a city after its population increased in seven years from 200 to more than 4,000.
- 1943 – The Holocaust: Almost all Jews in Bulgarian-occupied northern Greece were deported to Treblinka extermination camp to be killed.
- 2012 – A series of blasts occurred at an arms dump in Brazzaville, Republic of the Congo, killing at least 250 people and injuring 2,300 others.
- Stephen III of Hungary (d. 1172)
- Miriam Makeba (b. 1932)
- Harold Barrowclough (d. 1972)
March 5: Learn from Lei Feng Day in China; St Piran's Day in Cornwall, England
![Gordon French, co-founder of the Homebrew Computer Club](https://web.archive.org/web/20220808224603im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c2/Gordon_French_%282013%29.jpg/172px-Gordon_French_%282013%29.jpg)
- 363 – Roman–Persian Wars: Roman emperor Julian and his army set out from Antioch to attack the Sasanian Empire.
- 1279 – The Livonian branch of the Teutonic Order suffered a great loss when 71 knights died in the Battle of Aizkraukle.
- 1824 – The First Anglo-Burmese War, the longest and most expensive war in British Indian history, began.
- 1966 – BOAC Flight 911 disintegrated and crashed near Mount Fuji shortly after departure from Tokyo International Airport, killing all 113 passengers and 11 crew members on board.
- 1975 – Computer hobbyists in Silicon Valley held the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club (founder pictured), whose members went on to have great influence on the development of the personal computer.
- Gerardus Mercator (b. 1512)
- Alessandro Volta (d. 1827)
- Elaine Paige (b. 1948)
- 1447 – Tomaso Parentucelli became Pope Nicholas V.
- 1853 – Giuseppe Verdi's La traviata premiered at La Fenice in Venice, but the performance was considered so bad that it caused him to revise portions of the opera.
- 1933 – The Nazi Party took the first step in the Gleichschaltung process by passing the Enabling Act, giving the government the right to make laws without the involvement of the Reichstag.
- 1964 – In a radio broadcast, Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad announced that American boxer Cassius Clay would change his name to Muhammad Ali (pictured).
- 1987 – The ferry Herald of Free Enterprise capsized while leaving the harbour of Zeebrugge, Belgium, killing 193 people on board.
- Princess Clémentine of Orléans (b. 1817)
- Ayn Rand (d. 1982)
- Francisco Xavier do Amaral (d. 2012)
March 7: Feast day of Saints Perpetua and Felicity (Catholicism, Anglicanism, Lutheranism); National Heroes and Benefactors Day in Belize (2022)
- 1277 – Bishop Étienne Tempier promulgated a condemnation of 219 heretical propositions that were being discussed at the University of Paris.
- 1814 – War of the Sixth Coalition: Napoleon's army forced Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov's Russian troops to withdraw from the Chemin des Dames, but French casualties exceeded Russian losses.
- 1985 – The charity single "We Are the World" by the supergroup United Support of Artists for Africa was released, and went on to sell more than 20 million copies.
- 2009 – The Kepler space telescope (depicted), designed to discover Earth-like planets orbiting other stars, was launched.
- Heraclianus (d. 413)
- Harriet Jacobs (d. 1897)
- Viv Richards (b. 1952)
March 8: International Women's Day; Aurat March in Pakistan
- 1702 – Anne (pictured) became the Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland, succeeding her brother-in-law William III.
- 1736 – Nader Shah, the founder of the Afsharid dynasty, was crowned Shah of Iran.
- 1919 – During the Egyptian Revolution, British authorities arrested rebel leader Saad Zaghloul and exiled him to Malta.
- 1978 – BBC Radio 4 began broadcasting Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a science fiction radio series that was later adapted into novels, a television series, and other formats.
- 1983 – Cold War: In a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, U.S. president Ronald Reagan described the Soviet Union as an "evil empire".
- 2017 – The Azure Window, a limestone natural arch in Gozo, Malta, collapsed during a storm.
- Beatrice of Castile (b. 1293)
- Frederic Goudy (b. 1865)
- José Raúl Capablanca (d. 1942)
- 1009 – The first known record of the name of Lithuania appeared in an entry of the Annals of Quedlinburg, written in Saxony-Anhalt, present-day Germany.
- 1842 – Nabucco, the opera by Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi that established his reputation, premiered at La Scala in Milan.
- 1847 – Mexican–American War: The Siege of Veracruz began, the first large-scale amphibious assault conducted by United States military forces.
- 1932 – Éamon de Valera (pictured), one of the dominant political figures in 20th-century Ireland, became President of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State.
- 1959 – The popular fashion doll known as Barbie debuted at the American International Toy Fair in New York City.
- Mary Anning (d. 1847)
- Qayyum Chowdhury (b. 1932)
- The Notorious B.I.G. (d. 1997)
- 241 BC – The Roman Republic defeated Carthaginian forces at the Battle of the Aegates, off the western coast of Sicily, in the final battle of the First Punic War.
- 1916 – The final letter in the McMahon–Hussein Correspondence was written, agreeing that Britain would recognise Arab independence in return for the Sharif of Mecca launching a revolt against the Ottoman Empire.
- 1949 – Mildred Gillars, nicknamed Axis Sally, was convicted of treason for working with the Nazis as a broadcaster.
- 1967 – British progressive-rock band Pink Floyd released their first single, "Arnold Layne".
- 2019 – Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 (aircraft pictured) crashed shortly after take-off from Addis Ababa, with the deaths of all 157 people on board.
- Agnes Blannbekin (d. 1315)
- François Girardon (b. 1628)
- Anita Brookner (d. 2016)
![Eta Carinae and the surrounding Homunculus Nebula](https://web.archive.org/web/20220808224603im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/fc/Eta_Carinae.jpg/140px-Eta_Carinae.jpg)
- 222 – Disaffected with Roman emperor Elagabalus's disregard for Roman religious traditions and sexual taboos, the Praetorian Guard assassinated him and his mother, throwing his mutilated body into the Tiber.
- 1843 – During a period of activity known as the Great Eruption, Eta Carinae (pictured) briefly became the second-brightest star in the night sky.
- 1945 – World War II: Imperial Japan established the Empire of Vietnam, a short-lived puppet state, with Bảo Đại as its ruler.
- 1966 – President Sukarno signed the Supersemar, giving Indonesian general Suharto the authority to restore order during recent mass killings.
- 2012 – U.S. Army soldier Robert Bales murdered sixteen civilians and wounded six others in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan.
- Marie of France, Countess of Champagne (d. 1198)
- Anna Bochkoltz (b. 1815)
- Gladys Pearl Baker (d. 1984)
- 1622 – Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier, founders of the Jesuits, were canonized by Pope Gregory XV.
- 1881 – Andrew Watson captained the Scotland national football team against England, becoming the world's first black international footballer.
- 1934 – Supported by the Estonian army, Konstantin Päts staged a coup d'état, beginning the Era of Silence.
- 1952 – British diplomat Lord Ismay (pictured) was appointed the first secretary general of NATO.
- 2014 – A gas leak caused an explosion in the East Harlem neighborhood of New York City, destroying two apartment buildings and causing eight deaths.
- Symeon the New Theologian (d. 1022)
- Lise Tréhot (d. 1922)
- Jack Kerouac (b. 1922)
- 1697 – Nojpetén, capital of the Itza Maya kingdom, fell to Spanish conquistadors, the final step in the Spanish conquest of Guatemala.
- 1781 – William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus from the garden of his house in Bath, England, initially considering it to be a comet.
- 1811 – Napoleonic Wars: A British frigate squadron defeated a much larger squadron of French and Italian frigates and smaller vessels in the Battle of Lissa in the Adriatic Sea.
- 1920 – The Kapp Putsch (participants pictured), an attempted coup aiming to undo the German Revolution of 1918–1919, briefly ousted the government of the Weimar Republic.
- 1988 – The Seikan Tunnel, the longest and deepest tunnel in the world at the time, opened between the cities of Hakodate and Aomori, Japan.
- John Jervis, 1st Earl of St Vincent (d. 1823)
- Sālote Tupou III (b. 1900)
- Anne Acheson (d. 1962)
March 14: New Year's Day (Sikhism); Commonwealth Day in the Commonwealth of Nations (2022); White Day in parts of East Asia; Pi Day
- 1309 – On Eid al-Fitr, the citizens of Granada stormed palaces in the city, deposing Sultan Muhammad III and placing his half-brother Nasr on the throne.
- 1489 – Catherine Cornaro (pictured), Queen of Cyprus, was forced to abdicate and sell the administration of the island to the Republic of Venice.
- 1885 – The Mikado, Gilbert and Sullivan's most frequently performed Savoy opera, debuted at the Savoy Theatre in London.
- 1969 – Edward M. Burke, the longest-serving alderman in the history of the Chicago City Council, was sworn into office.
- 1984 – Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Féin, was seriously wounded in an assassination attempt by Ulster Freedom Fighters in central Belfast, Northern Ireland.
- Charles Ammi Cutter (b. 1837)
- Phil Vincent (b. 1908)
- Lies Noor (d. 1961)
- 856 – Byzantine emperor Michael III (pictured) overthrew his mother Theodora's regency to assume power for himself.
- 1147 – Reconquista: Portuguese troops under King Afonso I captured the city of Santarém from the Almoravids.
- 1875 – John McCloskey, Archbishop of New York, was created the first cardinal from the United States.
- 1972 – The Godfather, a gangster film directed by Francis Ford Coppola and based on the novel of the same name by Mario Puzo, was released.
- 1990 – Iraqi authorities hanged Iranian freelance reporter Farzad Bazoft on charges of spying for Israel.
- Daniele Comboni (b. 1831)
- Grace Chisholm Young (b. 1868)
- Arthur Compton (d. 1962)
March 16: Fast of Esther (Judaism, 2022); Remembrance Day of the Latvian Legionnaires
- 1322 – Despenser War: A royalist army defeated troops loyal to Thomas, 2nd Earl of Lancaster, in the Battle of Boroughbridge, which allowed King Edward II of England to hold on to power for another five years.
- 1872 – In the inaugural final of the FA Cup (trophy pictured), the world's oldest association football competition, Wanderers defeated Royal Engineers 1–0 at The Oval in Kennington, London.
- 1918 – Finnish Civil War: The Whites won the Battle of Länkipohja, after which they executed at least 70 Reds.
- 1962 – Flying Tiger Line Flight 739, a charter flight carrying U.S. and South Vietnamese soldiers, disappeared without a trace, prompting one of the largest searches in the history of the Pacific.
- 2014 – Annexation of Crimea: The Autonomous Republic of Crimea held a controversial referendum in which voters overwhelmingly chose to join Russia as a federal subject.
- Alaric Alexander Watts (b. 1797)
- John Pope (b. 1822)
- Manjural Islam Rana (d. 2007)
March 17: Saint Patrick's Day (Christianity); Anniversary of the Unification of Italy (1861)
- 1677 – Franco-Dutch War: France captured the town of Valenciennes in the Spanish Netherlands.
- 1891 – The transatlantic steamship Utopia accidentally collided with the battleship HMS Anson in the Bay of Gibraltar, sinking in less than twenty minutes and killing 562.
- 1942 – The Holocaust: The first mass killings of Jews began at Belzec extermination camp in occupied Poland, the first of the Operation Reinhard camps to begin operation.
- 1955 – Ice hockey fans in Montreal rioted to protest the suspension of Montreal Canadiens star Maurice Richard for hitting an official.
- 1985 – American serial killer Richard Ramirez (pictured), known as "the Night Stalker", began a home invasion burglary and killing spree that resulted in 13 deaths and 11 sexual assaults over the following five months.
- Rosina Heikel (b. 1842)
- Toni Preckwinkle (b. 1947)
- Margaret Whitlam (d. 2012)
March 18: Feast day of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem (Christianity)
- 1068 – An estimated 20,000 people died across the Near East when a violent earthquake struck the northern end of the Gulf of Aqaba.
- 1892 – Canadian governor general Lord Stanley of Preston pledged to donate an award to Canada's top-ranked amateur ice hockey club, now known as the Stanley Cup, the oldest professional sports trophy in North America.
- 1906 – Romanian inventor Traian Vuia became the first person to fly a heavier-than-air monoplane (pictured) with an unassisted takeoff.
- 1965 – Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov donned a space suit and ventured outside the Soviet spacecraft Voskhod 2, becoming the first person to walk in space.
- 1985 – The first episode of the soap opera Neighbours was broadcast on the Seven Network, later becoming the longest-running drama in Australian television history.
- Randal Cremer (b. 1828)
- Marcellin Berthelot (d. 1907)
- Unita Blackwell (b. 1933)
March 19: Saint Joseph's Day (Western Christianity)
- 1277 – The Byzantine Empire and the Republic of Venice signed a treaty that renegotiated and extended by two years a previous treaty between them.
- 1808 – King Charles IV of Spain was forced to abdicate in favour of his son Ferdinand VII as a result of the Tumult of Aranjuez.
- 1962 – Influential American musician Bob Dylan (pictured) released his eponymous debut album, mainly comprising traditional folk songs.
- 1998 – An unscheduled Ariana Afghan Airlines flight crashed into a mountain on approach into Kabul, killing all 45 people aboard.
- 2008 – The gamma-ray burst GRB 080319B, the farthest object that could be seen by the naked eye, was observed.
- Francis B. Spinola (b. 1821)
- Anna Held (b. 1872)
- Kym Bonython (d. 2011)
- 235 – Maximinus Thrax acceded to the throne of the Roman Empire as a so-called barracks emperor, who gained power by virtue of his command of the army.
- 1815 – After escaping from exile in Elba, Napoleon entered Paris, beginning the period known as the Hundred Days.
- 1922 – The United States Navy commissioned its first aircraft carrier, USS Langley.
- 1942 – World War II: After being forced to flee the Philippines for Australia, U.S. Army general Douglas MacArthur (pictured) announced: "I came through and I shall return."
- 2014 – Taliban militants carried out a mass shooting at the Kabul Serena Hotel in Afghanistan, killing nine civilians.
- Benjamin Truman (d. 1780)
- Maud Menten (b. 1879)
- S. Arasaratnam (b. 1930)
March 21: Oltenia Day in Romania
- 1788 – A large fire destroyed 856 of the 1,100 structures in New Orleans.
- 1814 – War of the Sixth Coalition: At the Battle of Arcis-sur-Aube in north-central France, Napoleon suddenly realized that his French army was vastly outnumbered by Allied forces, and hurriedly ordered a retreat.
- 1952 – The Moondog Coronation Ball (poster pictured), generally considered to be the first major rock and roll concert, took place at the Cleveland Arena in Cleveland, Ohio.
- 2019 – A major explosion at a chemical plant in Yancheng, China, killed 78 people and injured 617 others.
- Salvador Lutteroth (b. 1897)
- Nobuo Uematsu (b. 1959)
- Marina Salye (d. 2012)
- 1508 – Ferdinand II of Aragon appointed Amerigo Vespucci to the post of Chief Navigator of Spain.
- 1784 – The Emerald Buddha, considered to be the sacred palladium of Thailand, was installed in its current location at Wat Phra Kaew on the grounds of the Grand Palace in Bangkok.
- 1913 – Phan Xích Long (pictured), the self-proclaimed emperor of Vietnam, was arrested for organising a revolt against the colonial rule of French Indochina, which was nevertheless carried out by his supporters the following day.
- 1942 – Second World War: British and Italian naval forces fought the Second Battle of Sirte in the Gulf of Sidra north of Libya.
- John Kemp (d. 1454)
- Ahmed Cevdet Pasha (b. 1822)
- Odysseas Angelis (d. 1987)
- 1400 – After 175 years of rule, the Trần dynasty of Vietnam was deposed by Hồ Quý Ly, a court official.
- 1775 – American Revolution: Patrick Henry made his "Give me liberty, or give me death!" speech to the House of Burgesses of Virginia, urging military action against the British Empire.
- 1905 – About 1,500 Cretans, led by Eleftherios Venizelos, met at the village of Theriso to call for the island's unification with Greece, beginning the Theriso revolt.
- 1919 – Benito Mussolini and his supporters founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, the predecessor of the National Fascist Party.
- 1996 – Lee Teng-hui (pictured) was elected President of the Republic of China in the first direct presidential election in Taiwan.
- Mary of Jesus de León y Delgado (b. 1643)
- Juan Gris (b. 1887)
- Ben Hollioake (d. 2002)
March 24: World Tuberculosis Day
- 1869 – New Zealand Wars: Māori leader Tītokowaru's conflict ended with the last of his forces surrendering to the New Zealand colonial government.
- 1898 – The Winton Motor Carriage Company (ad pictured), one of the first American car companies, sold its first unit.
- 1922 – Irish War of Independence: In Belfast, two men wearing police uniforms broke into a house and murdered a Catholic family in what was believed to be a reprisal for the deaths of two policemen the day before.
- 1934 – The Tydings–McDuffie Act came into effect, which provided for self-government of the Philippines and for Filipino independence from the United States after a period of ten years.
- 1980 – One day after making a plea to Salvadoran soldiers to stop carrying out the government's repression, Archbishop Óscar Romero was assassinated while celebrating Mass in San Salvador.
- Hugh III of Cyprus (d. 1284)
- Antoine-Henri Jomini (d. 1869)
- Rudra Rajasingham (d. 2006)
March 25: Bengali Genocide Remembrance Day
- 1410 – The Yongle Emperor of Ming China launched the first of his military campaigns against the Mongols, resulting in the fall of the Mongol khan Bunyashiri.
- 1655 – Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens discovered Titan, the largest natural satellite of Saturn.
- 1911 – The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire (pictured) in New York City killed 146 sweatshop workers, many of whom could not escape because the doors to the stairwells and exits had been locked.
- 1934 – Enrico Fermi published his discovery of neutron-induced radioactivity, for which he was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1938.
- 1975 – King Faisal of Saudi Arabia was shot and killed by his nephew Faisal bin Musaid.
- Novalis (d. 1801)
- Harriet Backer (d. 1932)
- Elton John (b. 1947)
March 26: Earth Hour (20:30 local time in various areas, 2022)
- 1697 – The Safavid Empire began a four-year occupation of the Ottoman city of Basra on the Persian Gulf.
- 1885 – Perceiving that the Canadian government was failing to protect their rights, the Métis people led by Louis Riel began the North-West Rebellion.
- 1913 – First Balkan War: After a five-month siege, Bulgarian and Serbian forces (artillery pictured) captured the Ottoman city of Adrianople.
- 1975 – The Biological Weapons Convention, the first multilateral disarmament treaty banning the production of an entire category of weapons, entered into force.
- 1997 – Police in Rancho Santa Fe, California, discovered the bodies of 39 members of the religious group Heaven's Gate who had died in an apparent cult suicide.
- Jacob van Eyck (d. 1657)
- James Hutton (d. 1797)
- Guido Stampacchia (b. 1922)
March 27: Mothering Sunday (Western Christianity, 2022); Day of the Union of Bessarabia with Romania (1918)
- 1638 – The first of four strong earthquakes struck Calabria in southern Italy, which resulted in up to 30,000 combined deaths.
- 1850 – San Diego, the first European settlement in present-day California, was incorporated as a city.
- 1915 – Mary Mallon (pictured), the first person to be identified as an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever, was placed into quarantine in New York City, where she spent the rest of her life.
- 1977 – Two Boeing 747 airliners collided on a foggy runway at Los Rodeos Airport on the island of Tenerife, killing 583 people in the worst aircraft accident in aviation history.
- 2002 – Second Intifada: A suicide bomber killed around 30 Israeli civilians and injured about 140 others in Netanya, triggering Operation Defensive Shield, a large-scale counter-terrorist military incursion into the West Bank.
- Simon Bradstreet (d. 1697)
- Thomas Graham Brown (b. 1882)
- T. Sailo (d. 2015)
- 1802 – German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers discovered Pallas, the second asteroid ever identified, though it was considered to be a planet at the time.
- 1842 – The Vienna Philharmonic (pictured) held its first concert, conducted by Otto Nicolai.
- 1918 – World War I: British and Australian troops soundly defeated German forces at the First Battle of Dernancourt in northern France.
- 1942 – Second World War: The port of Saint-Nazaire in occupied France was disabled by British naval forces.
- 1979 – British prime minister James Callaghan was defeated by one vote in a vote of no confidence after his government struggled to cope with widespread strikes during the Winter of Discontent.
- Flodoard (d. 966)
- Solomon Foot (d. 1866)
- John Alderdice, Baron Alderdice (b. 1955)
March 29: Boganda Day in the Central African Republic (1959); Martyrs' Day in Madagascar (1947)
- 845 – Viking expansion: Viking raiders, possibly led by the legendary Ragnar Lodbrok, plundered and occupied Paris (depicted), holding the city for a large ransom.
- 1800 – William Matthews was ordained as the first British America-born Catholic priest.
- 1807 – German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers discovered Vesta, the brightest asteroid and second-most massive body in the asteroid belt.
- 1982 – Queen Elizabeth II granted royal assent to the Canada Act 1982, which ended any remaining constitutional dependence of Canada on the United Kingdom by a process known as patriation.
- 2010 – Islamist separatists of the Caucasus Emirate detonated two bombs on the Moscow Metro, killing 40 people and injuring 102 others.
- Santorio Santorio (b. 1561)
- March Fong Eu (b. 1922)
- Pap Cheyassin Secka (d. 2012)
March 30: Land Day in Palestinian communities (1976)
- 1822 – The United States merged East Florida and West Florida to create the Florida Territory.
- 1861 – British chemist William Crookes published his discovery of thallium using flame spectroscopy.
- 1912 – Sultan Abd al-Hafid signed the Treaty of Fes, making Morocco a French protectorate.
- 1950 – Usmar Ismail (pictured) began shooting Darah dan Doa, widely recognised as the first Indonesian film.
- 1972 – Vietnam War: North Vietnamese forces began the Easter Offensive in an attempt to gain as much territory and destroy as many South Vietnamese units as possible.
- Juan Manuel de Rosas (b. 1793)
- Nicolae Rădescu (b. 1874)
- Fred Korematsu (d. 2005)
March 31: Cesar Chavez Day in various U.S. states (1927)
- 1761 – Lisbon experienced its second major earthquake in six years, with effects felt as far north as Scotland.
- 1899 – Philippine–American War: Malolos, capital of the First Philippine Republic, was captured by American forces.
- 1942 – Second World War: Because of a mutiny by Indian soldiers against their British officers, Japanese troops captured Christmas Island without any resistance.
- 1992 – USS Missouri (pictured), the last active United States Navy battleship, was decommissioned in Long Beach, California.
- 2018 – Nikol Pashinyan began his protest walk, starting in the city of Gyumri, opening the 2018 Armenian revolution.
- Pope Benedict XIV (b. 1675)
- Edward FitzGerald (b. 1809)
- Ahmad Sayyed Javadi (d. 2013)
Selected anniversaries / On this day archive
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Selected anniversaries for April
April 1: Iranian Islamic Republic Day (1979)
- 1293 – Robert Winchelsey left England for Rome to be consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury, but a papal vacancy delayed the ceremony.
- 1833 – Mexican Texans met at San Felipe de Austin to begin the Convention of 1833.
- 1941 – Soviet border guards opened fire on civilians attempting to cross the border from the Soviet Union to Romania near Fântâna Albă, killing between 44 and 3,000 people.
- 2001 – Same-sex marriage in the Netherlands was legalised (wedding pictured), with the country becoming the first to do so.
- Franz Egon von Fürstenberg-Heiligenberg (d. 1682)
- Frederick Denison Maurice (d. 1872)
- Anne McCaffrey (b. 1926)
April 2: World Autism Awareness Day; first day of Ramadan (Islam, 2022); Cheti Chand begins / Ugadi in parts of India (Hinduism, 2022); feast day of Saint Francis of Paola (Catholicism); Malvinas Day in Argentina
- 1863 – About 5,000 people in Richmond, Virginia, mostly poor women, rioted in protest of the high price of bread.
- 1982 – Argentine special forces invaded the Falkland Islands, sparking the Falklands War against the United Kingdom.
- 1992 – John Gotti (pictured), the head of the Gambino crime family of New York City, was convicted of racketeering, murder, conspiracy to commit murder, loansharking, obstruction of justice, illegal gambling, and tax evasion.
- 2002 – Second Intifada: Palestinian militants sought refuge from advancing Israeli forces in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, beginning a month-long siege.
- Charlemagne (b. 747)
- Paškal Buconjić (b. 1834)
- Juanito (d. 1992)
- 1860 – The Pony Express, a mail service that became the most direct means of long-distance communication across the United States before the first transcontinental telegraph, began operation.
- 1895 – The libel trial instigated by Irish author Oscar Wilde (pictured) began, eventually resulting in his arrest, trial and imprisonment on charges of gross indecency.
- 1922 – Joseph Stalin became the first general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
- 1948 – Division of Korea: A communist uprising began on Jeju Island, eventually leading to thousands of deaths and atrocities committed by both sides.
- 2016 – The first news stories on the Panama Papers were published, revealing that shell corporations represented by the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca had been used for illegal purposes.
- George Herbert (b. 1593)
- Ernst Chladni (d. 1827)
- SethBling (b. 1987)
- 1866 – Russian tsar Alexander II narrowly survived an assassination attempt by Dmitry Karakozov.
- 1873 – The Kennel Club, the world's oldest kennel club, was founded in the United Kingdom after Sewallis Shirley became frustrated by trying to organise dog shows without a consistent set of rules.
- 1905 – An earthquake hit the Kangra Valley in India, killing more than 20,000 people and destroying most buildings in Kangra, McLeod Ganj, and Dharamshala.
- 1949 – Twelve nations signed the North Atlantic Treaty, establishing NATO, an organization that constitutes a system of collective defense whereby its member states agree to mutual defense in response to an attack by any external party.
- 1968 – American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. (pictured) was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.
- William Strachey (b. 1572)
- Pierre Monteux (b. 1875)
- Isaac K. Funk (d. 1912)
April 5: Feast day of Saint Vincent Ferrer (Catholicism); Hansik in South Korea (2022)
- 919 – The Fatimid Caliphate began a second unsuccessful invasion of Egypt, then under Abbasid rule.
- 1614 – Pocahontas, a Native American woman, married English colonist John Rolfe in the Colony of Virginia.
- 1902 – A spectator stand collapsed (pictured) during a Scotland–England football match at Ibrox Park, Govan, killing 25 supporters and injuring more than 500 others.
- 1944 – Siegfried Lederer, a Czech Jew, escaped from Auschwitz with the aid of an SS officer who opposed the Holocaust.
- 1986 – The Libyan secret service bombed a discotheque in West Berlin, resulting in three deaths and 229 others injured.
- Jules Cambon (b. 1845)
- María Blanchard (d. 1932)
- Jim Marshall (d. 2012)
- 1712 – A group of 23 slaves in New York City revolted, setting fire to a building, but were soon recaptured.
- 1830 – Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer and others formally organized the Church of Christ, starting the Latter Day Saint movement.
- 1994 – The aircraft carrying Rwandan president Juvénal Habyarimana (pictured) and Burundian president Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down in Kigali; the event became the catalyst for the Rwandan genocide.
- 2012 – The National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad unilaterally declared the region of Azawad independent from Mali.
- Leonora Baroni (d. 1670)
- Philip Henry Gosse (b. 1810)
- Julie Ertz (b. 1992)
April 7: National Beer Day in the United States
- 1862 – American Civil War: Union forces defeated Confederate troops at the Battle of Shiloh, the bloodiest battle in U.S. history at the time, in Hardin County, Tennessee.
- 1896 – An Arctic expedition led by Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen (pictured) reached 86°13.6′N, almost three degrees beyond the previous Farthest North latitude.
- 1949 – The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific, based on Tales of the South Pacific by James Michener, opened on Broadway.
- 1972 – Communist forces overran the South Vietnamese town of Lộc Ninh.
- 1995 – First Chechen War: Russian paramilitary troops began a massacre of hundreds of civilians in Samashki, Chechnya.
- Berengar I of Italy (d. 924)
- Martha Ray (d. 1779)
- Joseph Lyons (d. 1939)
- 217 – Roman emperor Caracalla (pictured) was assassinated near Harran and succeeded by his Praetorian Guard prefect Macrinus.
- 876 – Abbasid forces decisively defeated those of Saffarid emir Ya'qub ibn Laith, forcing the latter to halt his advance into Iraq.
- 1630 – Kiliaen van Rensselaer purchased land near present-day Albany, New York, to found the Manor of Rensselaerswyck, which became the most successful patroonship under the Dutch West India Company.
- 1904 – Longacre Square in Midtown Manhattan, was renamed Times Square after the New York Times building.
- 1942 – World War II: The United States Army Air Forces flew its first mission from India over the Hump (the eastern end of the Himalayas) to deliver materiel to China.
- John II Komnenos (d. 1143)
- Niels Juel (d. 1697)
- Jack Tramiel (d. 2012)
April 9: Vimy Ridge Day in Canada (1917); Day of Valor in the Philippines (1942)
- 1860 – Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville recorded himself singing "Au clair de la lune" on his phonautograph, producing the oldest known recording of an audible human voice.
- 1917 – First World War: The Canadian Corps began the first wave of attacks at the Battle of Vimy Ridge in Vimy, France.
- 1942 – World War II: Japanese forces defeated Allied troops at the Battle of Bataan in the Philippines before beginning to forcibly transfer more than 90,000 prisoners of war to prison camps in the Bataan Death March.
- 1980 – Iraqi philosopher Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr (pictured) and his sister Amina were executed by the regime of Saddam Hussein.
- 1999 – President of Niger Ibrahim Baré Maïnassara was shot dead by soldiers in Niamey.
- al-Muqtafi (d. 1096)
- Mary Jackson (b. 1921)
- Peter Canavan (b. 1971)
April 10: Holy Week begins (Western Christianity, 2022)
- 1815 – Mount Tambora in Indonesia began the most powerful volcanic eruption in recorded history, killing at least 71,000 people and affecting temperatures worldwide.
- 1858 – Big Ben, the bell in the Palace of Westminster's clock tower in London, was cast after the original bell cracked during testing.
- 1919 – Mexican Revolution leader Emiliano Zapata (pictured) was shot to death near Ciudad Ayala, Morelos.
- 1963 – The U.S. Navy nuclear submarine USS Thresher (SSN-593) sank with all hands lost during deep-diving tests in the North Atlantic Ocean.
- 1992 – First Nagorno-Karabakh War: Dozens of Armenian civilians were massacred in the village of Maraga by Azerbaijani forces.
- Samuel Hahnemann (b. 1755)
- Kishori Amonkar (b. 1932)
- Stu Sutcliffe (d. 1962)
- 1241 – Mongol invasion of Europe: Mongol forces led by Batu Khan and Subutai defeated the army of King Béla IV at the Battle of Mohi near the river Sajó, a key victory in their first invasion of Hungary.
- 1814 – The Treaty of Fontainebleau was signed, ending the War of the Sixth Coalition, and forcing Napoleon to abdicate as ruler of France and sending him into exile on Elba.
- 1913 – The cricket pavilion at the Nevill Ground was destroyed in an arson attack (damage pictured) that was attributed to militant suffragettes as part of a country-wide campaign co-ordinated by the Women's Social and Political Union.
- 2002 – In a coup attempt, members of the Venezuelan military detained President Hugo Chávez and demanded his resignation.
- Christopher Smart (b. 1722)
- Percy Lavon Julian (b. 1899)
- Muhammad Kamaruzzaman (d. 2015)
April 12: Cosmonautics Day in Russia (1961); Education and Sharing Day in the United States (2022); Yuri's Night
- 1204 – Troops of the Fourth Crusade entered Constantinople and began a sack of the city, temporarily dissolving the Byzantine Empire.
- 1822 – Greek War of Independence: Ottoman troops began a massacre of tens of thousands of Greeks (depicted) on the island of Chios.
- 1961 – Aboard Vostok 1, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin performed the first human spaceflight, completing one orbit of Earth in 108 minutes.
- 1980 – Samuel Doe took control of Liberia in a coup d'etat, overthrowing President William Tolbert and ending over 130 years of national democratic presidential succession.
- 2014 – A fire broke out in the hills near Valparaíso, Chile, eventually destroying at least 2,500 homes and leaving approximately 11,000 people homeless.
- Richeza of Poland, Queen of Sweden (b. 1116)
- Nicola Amati (d. 1684)
- Abbie Hoffman (d. 1989)
- 1777 – American Revolutionary War: British and Hessian forces conducted a surprise attack against a Continental Army outpost at Bound Brook, New Jersey.
- 1829 – The Roman Catholic Relief Act received royal assent, removing the most substantial restrictions on Catholics in the United Kingdom.
- 1942 – Austrian soldier Anton Schmid was executed for rescuing Jews from the Ponary massacre in Vilnius.
- 1956 – The Vietnamese National Army captured Ba Cụt, a military commander of the religious sect Hòa Hảo, which ran a de facto state in South Vietnam in opposition to Prime Minister Ngô Đình Diệm.
- 2009 – Twenty-three people died in a fire at a homeless hostel (aftermath pictured) in Kamień Pomorski; it was Poland's deadliest fire since 1980.
- Arthur Matthew Weld Downing (b. 1850)
- Joe Hewitt (b. 1901)
- Evelyne Daitz (b. 1936)
April 14: Vaisakhi (Sikhism, 2022); Tamil New Year and other New Year festivals in South and Southeast Asia (2022); Day of the Georgian Language (1978); N'Ko Alphabet Day in West Africa (1949)
- 966 – Polish ruler Mieszko I converted to Christianity, an event considered to be the founding of the Polish state.
- 1471 – Wars of the Roses: The Yorkists under Edward IV defeated the Lancastrians at the Battle of Barnet, killing Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick.
- 1908 – The first Hauser Dam in the U.S. state of Montana failed, causing severe flooding and damage downstream.
- 1945 – World War II: The German town of Friesoythe was razed by the 4th Canadian Division on the orders of Major General Christopher Vokes.
- 1999 – A storm dropped around 500,000 tonnes of hailstones on Sydney (examples pictured) and the east coast of New South Wales, causing about A$2.3 billion in damages, the costliest natural disaster in Australian insurance history.
- Anne Sullivan (b. 1866)
- John Gielgud (b. 1904)
- M. Visvesvaraya (d. 1962)
April 15: Day of the Sun in North Korea
- 769 – The final session of the Lateran Council, convened to rectify abuses in the papal electoral process that had led to the elevation of the antipopes Constantine II and Philip, was held in Rome.
- 1632 – Thirty Years' War: A Swedish–German army defeated the forces of the Catholic League at the Battle of Rain, mortally wounding their commander Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly.
- 1912 – More than 1,500 people on the Titanic died when the passenger liner sank after colliding with an iceberg southeast of Newfoundland.
- 1922 – U.S. senator John B. Kendrick (pictured) introduced a resolution calling for an investigation of a secret land deal involving U.S. president Warren G. Harding's administration, leading to the Teapot Dome scandal.
- 1952 – The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress, a long-range, subsonic, jet-powered, strategic bomber operated by the U.S. Air Force for most of the aircraft's history, made its first flight.
- Leonhard Euler (b. 1707)
- Arsenio Lacson (d. 1962)
- Seth Rogen (b. 1982)
April 16: First day of Passover (Judaism, 2022)
- 1520 – Citizens of Toledo, Castile, opposed to the rule of the foreign-born Charles I, revolted when the royal government attempted to unseat radical city councilors.
- 1862 – Slavery in Washington, D.C., ended when the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act became law.
- 1912 – American pilot Harriet Quimby (pictured) became the first woman to fly across the English Channel.
- 1963 – In response to an open letter written by white clergymen, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote the Letter from Birmingham Jail in defence of the strategy of nonviolent resistance against racism.
- 2001 – India and Bangladesh began a six-day conflict over their disputed border, which ended in a stalemate.
- Tabinshwehti (b. 1516)
- Farran Zerbe (b. 1871)
- Johnny Peirson (d. 2021)
April 17: Easter (Western Christianity, 2022); Evacuation Day in Syria (1946)
![The superstructure, bow guns, and wing turrets of Minas Geraes](https://web.archive.org/web/20220808224603im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/7d/Minas_Geraes_from_bow.jpg/125px-Minas_Geraes_from_bow.jpg)
- 1080 – Canute IV became King of Denmark upon the death of his brother Harald III.
- 1797 – French Revolutionary Wars: British forces commanded by Lieutenant-General Ralph Abercromby invaded the Spanish colonial port of San Juan, Puerto Rico.
- 1907 – Minas Geraes (pictured), the first of three Brazilian dreadnought battleships, was laid down, sparking a vastly expensive South American naval arms race with Argentina and Chile.
- 1951 – The Peak District was designated the first national park in the United Kingdom.
- 1971 – Ustaše-affiliated Croatian separatists attacked the Yugoslav embassy in Stockholm, fatally shooting the ambassador, Vladimir Rolović.
- Benjamin Franklin (d. 1790)
- Karen Blixen (b. 1885)
- Victoria Beckham (b. 1974)
April 18: Patriots' Day in various U.S. states (2022)
- 1689 – Glorious Revolution: Provincial militia and citizens in Boston revolted, arresting officials of the Dominion of New England.
- 1915 – World War I: Hit by ground fire, French aviation pioneer Roland Garros (pictured) landed his aircraft behind enemy lines and was taken prisoner.
- 1949 – The Republic of Ireland Act 1948 came into force, declaring Ireland a republic and terminating its membership in the British Commonwealth of Nations.
- 1958 – Controversial American poet Ezra Pound was released from St. Elizabeths Hospital, a psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C., in which he had been incarcerated for twelve years.
- 2019 – The United States Department of Justice released a redacted version of the Mueller report about the investigation of Russian influence on the U.S. presidential election to Congress and the public.
- Gratian (b. 359)
- Polydore Vergil (d. 1555)
- Robert Christgau (b. 1942)
April 19: Feast day of Saint Alphege of Canterbury (Catholicism, Anglicanism)
- 1713 – With no living male heirs, Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor, issued the Pragmatic Sanction, allowing the Habsburg hereditary possessions to be inherited by a daughter.
- 1775 – The American Revolutionary War began with the Battles of Lexington and Concord in the British colony of Massachusetts.
- 1903 – Anti-Jewish riots broke out in Kishinev, the capital of Bessarabia Governorate, causing the death of nearly 50 Jews and focusing worldwide attention on the persecution of Jews in Russia.
- 1956 – American actress Grace Kelly (pictured) became the princess consort of Monaco upon her marriage to Rainier III, Prince of Monaco.
- 1984 – "Advance Australia Fair", written by Scottish-born composer Peter Dodds McCormick, officially replaced "God Save the Queen" as Australia's national anthem.
- Ernst Rüdin (b. 1874)
- Jiroemon Kimura (b. 1897)
- Kwon Ki-ok (d. 1988)
April 20: 420 (cannabis culture)
- 1657 – Anglo-Spanish War: The English navy sank much of a Spanish treasure fleet at the Battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife off the Canary Islands, but was unable to capture the treasure.
- 1828 – French explorer René Caillié reached Timbuktu in present-day Mali, and later received a 9,000-franc prize from the Société de Géographie for being the first European to return with a description of the city.
- 1914 – A fire and a gun battle between the Colorado National Guard and striking coal miners led to 17 deaths in the Ludlow Massacre.
- 1968 – Enoch Powell (pictured), a British Conservative member of Parliament, made a controversial speech in opposition to immigration and anti-discrimination legislation, resulting in his removal from the shadow cabinet.
- Peter Bartholomew (d. 1099)
- Allegra Byron (d. 1822)
- Toller Cranston (b. 1949)
April 21: First day of Ridván (Baháʼí Faith, 2022); Grounation Day (Rastafari)
![Romulus and Remus suckling from the Capitoline Wolf](https://web.archive.org/web/20220808224603im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6a/She-wolf_suckles_Romulus_and_Remus.jpg/162px-She-wolf_suckles_Romulus_and_Remus.jpg)
- 753 BC – Romulus and Remus (depicted) legendarily founded the city of Rome, according to the calculations of ancient Roman scholar Varro Reatinus.
- 1509 – Henry VIII became King of England, following the death of his father Henry VII, eventually becoming a significant figure in the history of the English monarchy.
- 1925 or 1926 – Al-Baqi Cemetery in Medina, the site of the mausoleum of four of the Twelve Imams of Shia Islam, was demolished by Wahhabis.
- 1962 – The Century 21 Exposition, the first world's fair in the United States since World War II, opened in Seattle.
- Pope Alexander II (d. 1073)
- Antonín Kammel (b. 1730)
- Cheryl Gillan (b. 1952)
- 1500 – A fleet commanded by Pedro Álvares Cabral anchored off the coast of present-day Brazil, claiming the land for the Portuguese Empire.
- 1622 – Anglo-Persian forces combined to capture the Portuguese garrison at Hormuz Island in the Persian Gulf.
- 1864 – The U.S. Congress authorized the creation of a two-cent coin (pictured), the first U.S. currency to bear the phrase "In God We Trust".
- 1945 – About 600 prisoners of the Jasenovac concentration camp in the Independent State of Croatia revolted, but only 80 managed to escape while the remainder were killed by the Ustaše regime.
- 2004 – Flammable cargo exploded at a railway station in Ryongchon, North Korea, killing at least 54 people and injuring more than a thousand others.
- Germaine de Staël (b. 1766)
- Henry Conwell (d. 1842)
- Donna Williams (d. 2017)
April 23: National Sovereignty and Children's Day in Turkey (1920)
- 1661 – Charles II was crowned King of England, Scotland and Ireland at Westminster Abbey.
- 1891 – Chilean Civil War: The armored frigate Blanco Encalada was sunk at the Battle of Caldera Bay, the first ironclad warship lost to a self-propelled torpedo.
- 1927 – Cardiff City defeated Arsenal 1–0 in the FA Cup Final (match programme pictured), the only time the FA Cup has been won by a non-English team.
- 1942 – Second World War: In retaliation for the Royal Air Force's bombing of Lübeck, the Luftwaffe began a series of air raids across England, beginning with Exeter.
- 2019 – A landslide triggered the collapse of a jade mine in Hpakant, Myanmar, resulting in six confirmed deaths and presumed dozens more.
- Karl Friedrich Bahrdt (d. 1792)
- Halston (b. 1932)
- Satyajit Ray (d. 1992)
April 24: Easter (Eastern Christianity, 2022); Divine Mercy Sunday (Catholicism, 2022); Night of Decree (Shia Islam, 2022); Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day (1915)
- 1704 – John Campbell released the first issue of The Boston News-Letter, the first continuously published newspaper in British North America.
- 1866 – German composer Max Bruch conducted the premiere of his first violin concerto, which later became his most famous work.
- 1922 – The first portion of the Imperial Wireless Chain, a strategic international wireless telegraphy communications network created to link the countries of the British Empire, opened.
- 1932 – An estimated 400 ramblers committed a wilful mass trespass of Kinder Scout (pictured) in the Peak District to highlight the denial of access to areas of open country in England.
- 1965 – Cold War: The Dominican Civil War broke out due to tensions following a military coup against the democratically elected government of President Juan Bosch two years earlier.
- Axel von Fersen the Elder (d. 1794)
- Benjamin Lee Whorf (b. 1897)
- Richard M. Daley (b. 1942)
April 25: Anzac Day in Australia and New Zealand (1915); Liberation Day in Italy (1945)
- 799 – Leo III was attacked by partisans of his predecessor Adrian I, but was rescued and taken to Charlemagne, as described in the epic Karolus magnus et Leo papa.
- 1644 – Ming–Qing transition: The Ming dynasty of China fell when the Chongzhen Emperor committed suicide during a peasant rebellion led by Li Zicheng.
- 1932 – Gladys Elinor Watkins consecrated the carillon of the National War Memorial in New Zealand (dedication pictured).
- 1946 – Two passenger trains collided in Naperville, Illinois, leaving 45 people dead and some 125 injured.
- 1990 – Violeta Chamorro took office as president of Nicaragua, becoming the first female head of state in the Americas to have been elected in her own right.
- Anders Celsius (d. 1744)
- Kojo Tovalou Houénou (b. 1887)
- Henck Arron (b. 1936)
April 26: World Intellectual Property Day
- 1478 – In a conspiracy to replace the Medici family as rulers of the Republic of Florence, the Pazzi family attacked Lorenzo de' Medici and killed his brother Giuliano at Florence Cathedral.
- 1865 – U.S. Army soldiers cornered and fatally shot John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of U.S. president Abraham Lincoln, ending a twelve-day manhunt.
- 1941 – Boris Kidrič and Edvard Kardelj founded the Liberation Front of the Slovene Nation, the main anti-fascist Slovene civil-resistance and political organization during World War II.
- 1958 – Service ended on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad's Royal Blue Line, one of the first major electrified train lines in the U.S. (steam train pictured).
- 1970 – The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) came into being when the WIPO Convention entered into force.
- Samuel Bellamy (d. 1717)
- Hack Wilson (b. 1900)
- Margaret Scott (b. 1922)
April 27: Koningsdag in the Netherlands; Administrative Professionals Day in various countries (2022)
- 1522 – Four Years' War: The combined forces of Spain and the Papal States defeated a French and Venetian army at the Battle of Bicocca.
- 1777 – American Revolutionary War: British Army regulars defeated Patriot militias in the Battle of Ridgefield, galvanizing resistance in the Connecticut Colony.
- 1961 – Prime Minister Milton Margai led the Sierra Leone Colony and Protectorate to independence from the United Kingdom.
- 1985 – The black-ball final, one of the most famous snooker matches in history, began between Steve Davis and Dennis Taylor (pictured).
- 2012 – Unknown perpetrators carried out a series of four bombings in Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine.
- Ulysses S. Grant (b. 1822)
- Sheila Scott (b. 1922)
- Olivier Messiaen (d. 1992)
April 28: Workers' Memorial Day; Sa die de sa Sardigna in Sardinia, Italy
- 1611 – The University of Santo Tomas in Manila, one of the oldest existing universities in Asia and one of the world's largest Catholic universities in terms of enrollment, was founded.
- 1887 – A week after being arrested by the Prussian Secret Police, French police inspector Guillaume Schnaebelé (pictured) was released on the order of William I, the German Emperor, defusing a possible war.
- 1910 – Flying from London to Manchester, French aviator Louis Paulhan won the first long-distance aeroplane race in England.
- 1952 – Japan and the Republic of China signed the Treaty of Taipei to officially end the Second Sino-Japanese War, seven years after fighting in that conflict ended due to World War II.
- Rhys ap Gruffydd (d. 1197)
- Tobias Asser (b. 1838)
- Penélope Cruz (b. 1974)
April 29: International Quds Day (2022)
- 1386 – The Grand Duchy of Lithuania decisively won the Battle of the Vikhra River, forcibly making the Principality of Smolensk a vassal state.
- 1760 – Seven Years' War: France began an unsuccessful attempt to retake Quebec City, which had been captured by Britain.
- 1910 – Parliament passed the People's Budget, the first budget in British history with the express intent of redistributing wealth.
- 1992 – The acquittal of policemen who had beaten African-American motorist Rodney King sparked six days of civil unrest in Los Angeles (damage pictured), during which 63 people were killed.
- George Farquhar (d. 1707)
- Marietta Blau (b. 1894)
- Giacomo dalla Torre (d. 2020)
April 30: Reunification Day in Vietnam (1975)
- 1006 – SN 1006 (remnant pictured), the brightest supernova in recorded history, first appeared in the constellation Lupus.
- 1789 – George Washington took the oath of office as the first president of the United States at Federal Hall in New York City.
- 1897 – British physicist J. J. Thomson and his team announce the discovery of the electron.
- 1945 – World War II: As Allied forces closed in on Berlin, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler committed suicide in the Führerbunker with Eva Braun one day after their marriage.
- 1982 – Sixteen monks and a nun of the Hindu organisation Ananda Marga were beaten to death and set on fire in Calcutta, India.
- Marie of the Incarnation (d. 1672)
- Emily Stowe (d. 1903)
- Kirsten Dunst (b. 1982)
Selected anniversaries / On this day archive
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Selected anniversaries for May
May 1: International Workers' Day; Beltane and Samhain in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, respectively; Maharashtra Day in Maharashtra, India (1960); Loyalty Day in the United States
- 880 – The Nea Ekklesia church in Constantinople, on which many later cross-in-square Orthodox churches were based, was consecrated.
- 1776 – The secret society known as the Order of Illuminati was founded by Adam Weishaupt and Adolph Freiherr Knigge in Ingolstadt, Bavaria, Germany.
- 1884 – Moses Fleetwood Walker (pictured), the last African American in Major League Baseball until Jackie Robinson, played his first game for the Toledo Blue Stockings.
- 1947 – Sicilian separatist Salvatore Giuliano and his gang fired into a crowd of May Day marchers near Piana degli Albanesi, Sicily, killing 11 and wounding 33.
- 2016 – The evacuation of nearly 88,000 people began when a wildfire swept through Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, and burned for another 14 months, becoming the costliest disaster in Canadian history.
- Paul I Šubić of Bribir (d. 1312)
- Adelsteen Normann (b. 1848)
- Aram Khachaturian (d. 1978)
May 2: Eid al-Fitr (Islam, 2022); Flag Day in Poland
- 1670 – A royal charter granted the Hudson's Bay Company a monopoly in the fur trade in Rupert's Land (present-day Canada).
- 1878 – A dust explosion at the world's largest flour mill in Minneapolis resulted in 18 deaths.
- 1945 – World War II: General Helmuth Weidling, the German commander of Berlin, surrendered to Soviet forces led by Marshal Georgy Zhukov, ending the Battle of Berlin.
- 1982 – Falklands War: HMS Conqueror sank the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano (pictured), the only ship ever to have been deliberately sunk by a nuclear submarine in battle.
- 2014 – Russo-Ukrainian War: Forty-eight people were killed during a confrontation between pro-Russian protesters and pro-Ukrainian unity protesters in the southern Ukrainian port city of Odessa.
- Blanche of Artois (d. 1302)
- Ichiyō Higuchi (b. 1872)
- Dwayne Johnson (b. 1972)
May 3: World Press Freedom Day; Constitution Memorial Day in Japan (1947); Onbashira Festival in Nagano, Japan (2022); Constitution Day in Poland (1791)
- 1791 – The Great Sejm of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth ratified the first codified national constitution in Europe.
- 1845 – A long-running feud between two towns in Wisconsin came to a head when a schooner crashed into a bridge; they later merged to form the city of Milwaukee.
- 1913 – Raja Harishchandra (scene pictured), the first Indian feature-length film, was released.
- 1942 – Second World War: Japanese forces began an invasion of Tulagi and nearby islands in the British Solomon Islands, enabling them to threaten and intercept supply and communication routes between the United States and Australasia.
- 1999 – A Doppler on Wheels team measured the fastest winds recorded on Earth, at 301 ± 20 mph (484 ± 32 km/h), in a tornado near Bridge Creek, Oklahoma.
- Catherine of St. Augustine (b. 1632)
- Jacob Riis (b. 1849)
- Len Shackleton (b. 1922)
May 4: Youth Day in China; Yom HaZikaron in Israel (2022); Literary Day in Taiwan; Star Wars Day
- 1493 – Pope Alexander VI issued the papal bull Inter caetera, establishing a line of demarcation dividing the New World between Spain and Portugal.
- 1776 – American Revolution: The Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations became the first of the Thirteen Colonies to renounce its allegiance to the British Crown.
- 1942 – World War II: The Imperial Japanese Navy attacked Allied naval forces at the Battle of the Coral Sea, the first fleet action in which aircraft carriers engaged each other.
- 1982 – Falklands War: HMS Sheffield was struck by an Exocet missile, killing 20 sailors and leading to its sinking six days later—the first Royal Navy ship sunk in action since World War II.
- 2015 – The Parliament of Malta moved from the Grandmaster's Palace to the purpose-built Parliament House (pictured).
- Herman II of Swabia (d. 1003)
- Franklin Carmichael (b. 1890)
- Amos Oz (b. 1939)
May 5: Lusophone Culture Day; Independence Day in Israel (2022); Children's Day in Japan; Cinco de Mayo in Mexico and the United States (1862); National Day of Prayer in the United States (2022)
- 1891 – Carnegie Hall (interior pictured) in New York City, built by the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, officially opened with a concert conducted by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
- 1992 – The Twenty-seventh Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified, 202 years after it was first proposed.
- 2019 – Aeroflot Flight 1492 was struck by lightning after leaving Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport and caught fire during the subsequent emergency landing attempt, killing 41 people on board.
- Samuel Cooper (d. 1672)
- William George Beers (b. 1843)
- Irene Gut Opdyke (b. 1922)
- 1801 – French Revolutionary Wars: The 32-gun Spanish frigate El Gamo was captured by the outmanned and outgunned HMS Speedy.
- 1882 – U.S. president Chester A. Arthur signed the Chinese Exclusion Act into law (cartoon pictured), implementing a ban on Chinese immigration to the United States that remained for 61 years.
- 1915 – Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition: SY Aurora, anchored in McMurdo Sound, broke loose during a gale and began a 312-day drift in sea ice.
- 1988 – Widerøe Flight 710 crashed into the fog-covered mountain of Torghatten in Brønnøy, Norway, killing all 36 people on board.
- 2008 – British barrister Mark Saunders was shot dead by police after a five-hour siege at his home in Chelsea, London.
- Henry David Thoreau (d. 1862)
- Martin Brodeur (b. 1972)
- Reg Grundy (d. 2016)
- 1697 – The 13th-century castle of Tre Kronor in Stockholm burned down; plans for the current royal palace were presented within the year.
- 1763 – Pontiac, a Native American chief of the Odawa tribe, led an attempt to seize Fort Detroit from the British, marking the start of Pontiac's War.
- 1940 – A three-day debate began in the House of Commons that resulted in British prime minister Neville Chamberlain being replaced by Winston Churchill (pictured).
- 1999 – Kosovo War: NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, the United States bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
- 2009 – Police in Napier, New Zealand, began a 40-hour siege of the home of a former New Zealand Army member who had shot at officers during the routine execution of a search warrant.
- Mary of Modena (d. 1718)
- Philip Baxter (b. 1905)
- Willard Boyle (d. 2011)
May 8: World Red Cross and Red Crescent Day; Anniversary of the birth of Miguel Hidalgo in Mexico (1753); Victory in Europe Day (1945)
- 1821 – Greek War of Independence: At the Battle of Gravia Inn, a 120-man Greek force led by Odysseas Androutsos repulsed an Ottoman army of 8,000 soldiers.
- 1927 – French aviators Charles Nungesser and François Coli aboard the biplane L'Oiseau Blanc took off from Paris, attempting to make the first non-stop flight to New York, only to disappear before arrival.
- 1942 – World War II: The Axis launched a major counteroffensive, turning the tide of the Battle of the Kerch Peninsula.
- 1950 – The Tollund Man (pictured), a naturally mummified corpse, was discovered in a peat bog near Silkeborg, Denmark.
- 1972 – Four members of Black September hijacked Sabena Flight 571 to demand the release of 315 convicted Palestinian terrorists.
- Thomas Drury (b. 1551)
- Helena Blavatsky (d. 1891)
- Beatrice Worsley (d. 1972)
May 9: Europe Day in the European Union; Victory Day in various Eastern European countries (1945); Liberation Day in the Channel Islands (1945)
- 328 – Athanasius took office as Patriarch of Alexandria.
- 1864 – Second Schleswig War: The Battle of Heligoland (depicted), the last naval engagement fought by squadrons of wooden ships, took place between the Danish and Austro-Prussian fleets.
- 1918 – First World War: Germany repelled Britain's second attempt to blockade the Belgian port of Ostend.
- 1992 – An underground methane explosion occurred at the Westray Mine in Plymouth, Nova Scotia, killing all 26 Canadian coal miners who were working at the time.
- 2012 – The pilots of a Sukhoi Superjet, ignoring alerts from the terrain warning system, crashed the aircraft into Mount Salak in Indonesia, resulting in the deaths of all 45 people on board.
- Al-Adid (b. 1151)
- John Dalrymple, 2nd Earl of Stair (d. 1747)
- Yukiya Amano (b. 1947)
- 28 BC – The first precisely dated observation of a sunspot was made by Chinese astronomers of the Han dynasty.
- 1775 – American Revolutionary War: A small force of Patriots led by Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold captured Fort Ticonderoga (depicted) in New York, without significant injury or incident.
- 1941 – World War II: German Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess parachuted into Scotland in an attempt to negotiate peace with the British government.
- 1997 – An earthquake registering 7.3 Mw struck near Qaen, Iran, killing at least 1,567 and leaving around 50,000 others homeless.
- 2017 – Syrian civil war: The Syrian Democratic Forces, assisted by the U.S. military, captured the Tabqa Dam and surrounding countryside, completing the Battle of Tabqa.
- Leonhart Fuchs (d. 1566)
- Karl Barth (b. 1886)
- Arthur Kopit (b. 1937)
- 1745 – War of the Austrian Succession: French forces defeated those of the Pragmatic Allies at the Battle of Fontenoy in the Austrian Netherlands in present-day Belgium.
- 1812 – Spencer Perceval was shot in the lobby of the House of Commons, becoming the only British prime minister to be assassinated.
- 1963 – African Americans rioted in Birmingham, Alabama, in response to two bombings, perceiving local police to be complicit with the perpetrators.
- 1997 – Deep Blue (pictured) defeated Garry Kasparov in six games to become the first chess computer to win a match against a world champion.
- 2011 – An earthquake registering Mw 5.1, the worst to hit the region for more than 50 years, struck near Lorca, Spain.
- Juliette Récamier (d. 1849)
- William Grant Still (b. 1895)
- Abel Goumba (d. 2009)
- 1846 – The Donner Party, an American pioneer group which became known for resorting to cannibalism when they became trapped in the Sierra Nevada, left Independence, Missouri, for California.
- 1863 – American Civil War: The Confederates were routed in the Battle of Raymond, a small battle that had an inordinately large impact on the Vicksburg campaign.
- 1888 – North Borneo was established as a British protectorate.
- 1975 – The Cambodian navy seized the American container ship SS Mayaguez in what they claimed to be Cambodian territorial waters.
- 1982 – The Coppergate Helmet (pictured), the best preserved of the six known Anglo-Saxon helmets, was discovered.
- Thomas Palaiologos (d. 1465)
- Otto Frank (b. 1889)
- Rami Malek (b. 1981)
- 1373 – The English mystic Julian of Norwich (statue pictured) recovered from a severe illness during which she experienced a series of intense visions of Christ, which she later described in the first known English-language book written by a woman.
- 1861 – The Australian astronomer John Tebbutt discovered the Great Comet of 1861, through the tail of which the Earth passed later that year.
- 1913 – The Russian inventor Igor Sikorsky flew the self-designed Russky Vityaz, the world's first four-engine fixed-wing aircraft.
- 1972 – The Troubles: A car bomb planted by Ulster loyalists exploded outside a crowded pub in Belfast, Northern Ireland, beginning two days of gun battles between the British Army, the Provisional Irish Republican Army, and the Ulster Volunteer Force.
- 1992 – Li Hongzhi introduced the Falun Gong movement at a public lecture in Changchun, China.
- Cornelis Schut (b. 1597)
- Lorna Hodgkinson (b. 1887)
- H. Trendley Dean (d. 1962)
May 14: Feast day of Saint Matthias (Catholicism)
![U.S. Camel Corps at the Drum Barracks in California](https://web.archive.org/web/20220808224603im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d1/US_Camel_Corp_1.jpg/172px-US_Camel_Corp_1.jpg)
- 1264 – Second Barons' War: King Henry III was defeated at the Battle of Lewes and forced to sign the Mise of Lewes, making Simon de Montfort the de facto ruler of England.
- 1856 – Major Henry C. Wayne arrived in Indianola, Texas, with 34 camels to form the short-lived United States Camel Corps (pictured).
- 1919 – Sir Harry Hands, the mayor of Cape Town, performed the first public observance of a two-minute silence in remembrance of those killed in World War I.
- 1939 – In Lima, Peru, Lina Medina became the youngest confirmed mother in history, giving birth at the age of five years, seven months and twenty-one days.
- 2008 – On the day of the UEFA Cup Final, violence erupted between football hooligan supporters of both teams and the Greater Manchester Police, resulting in 39 arrests and 39 injured officers.
- Pope John XII (d. 964)
- Ants Kurvits (b. 1887)
- Christian B. Anfinsen (d. 1995)
May 15: Feast day of Saint Carthage (Catholicism); Nakba Day in Palestinian communities
![Baily's beads observed during a solar eclipse in 1999](https://web.archive.org/web/20220808224603im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ee/Solar_eclips_1999_6.jpg/147px-Solar_eclips_1999_6.jpg)
- 1252 – Pope Innocent IV issued the papal bull Ad extirpanda, authorizing the use of torture on heretics during the Medieval Inquisition.
- 1836 – English astronomer Francis Baily observed Baily's beads (example pictured), a phenomenon during a solar eclipse in which the rugged topography of the lunar limb allows sunlight to shine through.
- 1864 – American Civil War: A small Confederate force, which included cadets from the Virginia Military Institute, forced the Union Army out of the Shenandoah Valley.
- 1972 – The Ryukyu Islands were returned to Japan by the United States, and the U.S. occupation government was abolished.
- 2010 – Three days before her seventeenth birthday, Jessica Watson arrived in Sydney after sailing non-stop and unassisted around the world.
- Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (bapt. 1633)
- Jakucho Setouchi (b. 1922)
- Jean-Luc Dehaene (d. 2014)
- 1811 – Peninsular War: Allied British, Spanish, and Portuguese forces clashed with French troops at the Battle of Albuera fought south of Badajoz, Spain.
- 1832 – Prospector Juan Godoy discovered a silver outcrop in Chañarcillo, sparking the Chilean silver rush.
- 1925 – The first modern performance of Claudio Monteverdi's opera Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria occurred in Paris.
- 1958 – The Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, a supersonic interceptor aircraft, set a world flight airspeed record of 1,404.012 mph (2,259.538 km/h).
- 1975 – Based on the results of a referendum held about one month earlier, the Kingdom of Sikkim (flag pictured) abolished its monarchy and was annexed to become the 22nd state of India.
- Andrew Bobola (d. 1657)
- Horace Hutchinson (b. 1859)
- Nancy Roman (b. 1925)
May 17: International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia; Galician Literature Day in Galicia, Spain
- 1395 – An outnumbered Wallachian army repulsed invading Ottoman forces at the Battle of Rovine.
- 1902 – The Antikythera mechanism, the oldest known surviving geared mechanism, was discovered among artifacts retrieved from a shipwreck off the Greek island of Antikythera.
- 1947 – After renegotiating a contract with the makers of her signature perfume Chanel No. 5, Coco Chanel (pictured) received a share of wartime profits from its sale, making her one of the richest women in the world.
- 1974 – The Troubles: The Ulster Volunteer Force detonated a series of car bombs in Dublin and Monaghan, Ireland, killing 34 people and injuring almost 300 more.
- Martin Delrio (b. 1551)
- Dorothy Levitt (d. 1922)
- Maggie Laubser (d. 1973)
May 18: Haitian Flag Day in Haiti (1803); Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Crimean Tatar Genocide in Ukraine and several other countries
- 1302 – Armed insurrectionists massacred the occupying French garrison in Bruges, Flanders, killing approximately 2,000 people.
- 1695 – An earthquake measuring Ms7.8 struck Shanxi Province in northern China, resulting in at least 52,600 deaths.
- 1927 – Disgruntled school board treasurer Andrew Kehoe set off explosives with timers and a rifle (aftermath pictured), causing the Bath School disaster in the Bath Consolidated School in Michigan, killing 44 people in the deadliest mass murder in a school in United States history.
- 1955 – Operation Passage to Freedom, the evacuation of 310,000 Vietnamese civilians, soldiers and non-Vietnamese members of the French Army from communist North Vietnam to South Vietnam following the end of the First Indochina War, ended.
- 2006 – The Parliament of Nepal unanimously voted to strip King Gyanendra of many of his powers.
- Guido Luca Ferrero (b. 1537)
- Elijah Craig (d. 1808)
- Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran (d. 1922)
May 19: Global Accessibility Awareness Day (2022); Lag BaOmer (Judaism, 2022); Commemoration of Atatürk, Youth and Sports Day in Turkey (1919); Ho Chi Minh's Birthday in Vietnam
- 1655 – Anglo-Spanish War: England invaded Spanish Jamaica, capturing it a week later.
- 1743 – French physicist Jean-Pierre Christin published the design of a mercury thermometer using the centigrade scale, with 0 representing the melting point of water and 100 its boiling point.
- 1828 – The United States Congress passed the largest tariff in the nation's history, which resulted in severe economic hardship in the American South.
- 1997 – The Sierra Gorda Biosphere, which encompasses the most ecologically diverse region in Mexico, was established as a result of grassroots efforts.
- 2010 – In Bangkok, the Thai military (pictured) concluded a week-long crackdown on widespread protests by forcing the surrender of opposition leaders.
- Helena of Moscow (b. 1476)
- Ruth Ella Moore (b. 1903)
- John Gorton (d. 2002)
May 20: National Day of Remembrance in Cambodia (1976); National Day in Cameroon (1972); National Awakening Day in Indonesia (1908); Sanja Matsuri begins in Tokyo, Japan (2022)
- 1609 – Thomas Thorpe published the first copies of Shakespeare's sonnets, possibly without William Shakespeare's consent.
- 1875 – Representatives from seventeen countries signed the Metre Convention, which set up an institute for the purpose of coordinating international metrology and for coordinating the development of the metric system.
- 1927 – By the Treaty of Jeddah, the United Kingdom recognized the sovereignty of King Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia (pictured) over Hejaz and Nejd, which later merged to become Saudi Arabia.
- 1965 – While attempting to land at Cairo International Airport, Pakistan International Airlines Flight 705 crashed for unknown reasons, killing all but 6 of the 121 people on board.
- 2012 – The first of two major earthquakes struck Northern Italy, resulting in seven deaths.
- Thado Minsaw of Ava (b. 1531)
- Hieronymus von Colloredo (d. 1812)
- Nizamuddin Asir Adrawi (d. 2021)
- 1403 – King Henry III of Castile sent an embassy to the Timurid court to discuss a potential alliance against the Ottoman Empire.
- 1911 – Mexican president Porfirio Díaz and the revolutionary Francisco I. Madero signed the Treaty of Ciudad Juárez to end hostilities between each other's forces, concluding the initial phase of the Mexican Revolution.
- 1927 – Aboard the Spirit of St. Louis, American aviator Charles Lindbergh (pictured) completed the first solo non-stop transatlantic flight, flying from Roosevelt Field near New York City to Paris–Le Bourget Airport.
- 1946 – While working with a mass of plutonium known as the demon core, Manhattan Project physicist Louis Slotin accidentally exposed himself to a lethal dose of hard radiation.
- 2014 – A Taiwanese man carried out a stabbing spree on a Taipei Metro train, killing four people and injuring 24 others.
- Luis Fajardo (d. 1617)
- Anne Walter Fearn (b. 1867)
- Leonidas Vasilikopoulos (b. 1932)
May 22: International Day for Biological Diversity
- 1762 – The Trevi Fountain (pictured) in Rome was officially inaugurated by Pope Clement XIII.
- 1897 – The first Blackwall Tunnel under the River Thames was opened to improve commerce and trade in the East End of London.
- 1905 – Sultan Abdul Hamid II established the Ullah Millet, a separate millet for Aromanians within the Ottoman Empire.
- 1972 – The Dominion of Ceylon changed its name to Sri Lanka, adopted a new constitution, and officially became a republic within the Commonwealth.
- 2002 – Police announced that the skeletal remains of Federal Bureau of Prisons intern Chandra Levy, who had been missing for a year, had been found in Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C.
- T. Boone Pickens (b. 1928)
- Lady Gregory (d. 1932)
- Myrtle Bachelder (d. 1997)
May 23: Aromanian National Day; Victoria Day in Canada (2022)
- 1430 – Hundred Years' War: Joan of Arc (pictured) was captured by Burgundian forces at the Siege of Compiègne.
- 1706 – War of the Spanish Succession: The Grand Alliance armies routed the Franco-Spanish-Bavarian army in Ramillies, present-day Belgium.
- 1873 – The North-West Mounted Police, the forerunner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, was established to bring law and order to and assert Canadian sovereignty over the Northwest Territories.
- 1934 – During a strike against the Electric Auto-Lite company in Toledo, Ohio, U.S., a fight began between nearly 10,000 strikers and sheriff's deputies, later involving the Ohio National Guard.
- 2008 – The International Court of Justice awarded the Middle Rocks to Malaysia and Pedra Branca to Singapore, resolving a 29-year-old territorial dispute in the Singapore Strait.
- Philip I of France (b. 1052)
- C. R. M. F. Cruttwell (b. 1887)
- Florence Violet McKenzie (d. 1982)
May 24: Aldersgate Day (Methodism)
- 1567 – The mentally ill King Erik XIV of Sweden and his guards murdered five incarcerated nobles, including some members of the influential Sture family.
- 1738 – At a Moravian meeting in Aldersgate, London, John Wesley (pictured) experienced a spiritual rebirth, leading him to launch the Methodist movement.
- 1948 – Arab–Israeli War: After five days of fighting, Egyptian forces captured the Israeli community of Yad Mordechai after the defenders had abandoned it.
- 1962 – Project Mercury: American astronaut Scott Carpenter orbited the Earth three times in the Aurora 7 space capsule.
- 2006 – An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary film that has been credited for raising international public awareness of climate change and re-energizing the environmental movement, was released.
- Cathinka Buchwieser (b. 1789)
- Henry Sandham (b. 1842)
- Fanny Searls (d. 1939)
May 25: Africa Day (1963); Anniversary of the First National Government in Argentina (1810); Independence Day in Jordan (1946)
- 1644 – Ming–Qing transition: Ming general Wu Sangui allowed the invading Manchu to cross the Great Wall of China (pictured), enabling them to capture Beijing and establish the Qing dynasty.
- 1810 – The Primera Junta, the first independent government in Argentina, was established in an open cabildo in Buenos Aires, marking the end of the May Revolution.
- 1944 – The Wehrmacht and their collaborationist allies launched Operation Rösselsprung, a failed attempt to assassinate the Yugoslav Partisan leader Josip Broz Tito.
- 1962 – The Baltimore Steam Packet Company, the last overnight steamboat service in the United States, went out of business.
- 2012 – In a test flight, SpaceX's Dragon became the first commercial spacecraft to rendezvous and berth with the International Space Station.
- Flann Sinna (d. 916)
- Louise de Broglie, Countess d'Haussonville (b. 1818)
- Elisabeth Geleerd (d. 1969)
May 26: National Sorry Day in Australia; Independence Day in Georgia (1918)
- 1644 – Portuguese Restoration War: Portuguese and Spanish forces both claimed victory at the Battle of Montijo.
- 1822 – The deadliest fire in Norwegian history (depicted) occurred at a church in Grue, killing at least 113 people.
- 1897 – The Church of England returned the original manuscript of William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation, an account of the Pilgrims and the early years of the Plymouth Colony, to the state of Massachusetts.
- 1940 – Second World War: The Allies began a mass evacuation of British, French and Belgian troops cut off by the German army during the Battle of Dunkirk.
- 2002 – Barges being towed destroyed part of a bridge near Webbers Falls, Oklahoma, causing vehicles to fall into the Robert S. Kerr Reservoir on the Arkansas River.
- Edmond de Goncourt (b. 1822)
- Jyoti Gogte (b. 1956)
- Mufti Abdul Razzaq (d. 2021)
- 1199 – King John was crowned at Westminster Abbey.
- 1799 – War of the Second Coalition: Austrian forces defeated the French Army of the Danube, capturing the strategically important Swiss town of Winterthur.
- 1917 – Pope Benedict XV (pictured) promulgated the Pio-Benedictine Code, the first official comprehensive codification of Latin canon law.
- 1962 – A fire at a landfill in Centralia, Pennsylvania, spread to an abandoned coal mine, where it continues burning today.
- 2006 – An earthquake registering 6.4 Mw struck near the city of Yogyakarta on the southern side of the Indonesian island of Java, killing more than 5,700 people.
- Diego Ramírez de Arellano (d. 1624)
- John Cockcroft (b. 1897)
- Abram Hoffer (d. 2009)
May 28: Republic Day in Armenia (1918); Independence Day in Azerbaijan (1918)
- 585 BC – According to the Greek historian Herodotus, a solar eclipse, accurately predicted by Thales of Miletus, abruptly ended the Battle of Halys between the Lydians and the Medes.
- 1754 – French and Indian War: Led by 22-year-old George Washington, a company of Virginia colonial militiamen ambushed a force of 35 Canadiens at the Battle of Jumonville Glen (depicted).
- 1937 – The rise of Neville Chamberlain culminated with his accession as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
- 1998 – The Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission carried out five underground nuclear tests, becoming the seventh country in the world to successfully develop and publicly test nuclear weapons.
- 2002 – An independent commission appointed by the Football Association voted two-to-one to allow Wimbledon F.C. to relocate from London to Milton Keynes.
- Robert Baldock (d. 1327)
- Carl Larsson (b. 1853)
- Maeve Binchy (b. 1939)
May 29: Feast day of Saint Paul VI (Catholicism)
- 1233 – Mongol–Jin War: The Mongols entered and began looting Kaifeng, the capital of the Jin dynasty of China, after a 13-month siege.
- 1453 – With the fall of Constantinople, the Byzantine Empire fell to the Ottomans.
- 1913 – During the premiere of the ballet The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky (pictured) at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris, the avant-garde nature of the music and choreography caused a near-riot in the audience.
- 1942 – Bing Crosby recorded his version of the song "White Christmas", which went on to become the best-selling single worldwide, with more than 50 million copies sold.
- 1999 – President Olusegun Obasanjo took office as Nigeria's first elected and civilian head of state after 16 years of military dictatorship.
- Louise-Adéone Drölling (b. 1797)
- Erich Wolfgang Korngold (b. 1897)
- John Barrymore (d. 1942)
May 30: Statehood Day in Croatia (1990); Lod Massacre Remembrance Day in Puerto Rico (1972); Memorial Day in the United States
- 1854 – The Kansas–Nebraska Act became law, establishing the U.S. territories of Nebraska and Kansas, and allowing their settlers to determine if slavery would be permitted.
- 1866 – Bedřich Smetana's comic opera The Bartered Bride premiered in Prague.
- 1922 – The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., featuring a sculpture of the sixteenth U.S. president Abraham Lincoln (pictured) by Daniel Chester French, opened.
- 1972 – Members of the Japanese Red Army carried out the Lod Airport massacre in Tel Aviv, Israel, on behalf of PFLP External Operations, killing over 20 people and injuring almost 80 others.
- 2008 – The Convention on Cluster Munitions, prohibiting the use, transfer, and stockpiling of cluster bombs, was adopted.
- Antonina Houbraken (b. 1686)
- Wyndham Halswelle (b. 1882)
- Marcel Bich (d. 1994)
May 31: World No Tobacco Day; Feast of the Visitation (Catholicism and Anglicanism)
- 1293 – Majapahit forces under Raden Wijaya won a major victory in the Mongol invasion of Java, now considered to be the founding date of the Indonesian city of Surabaya.
- 1862 – American Civil War: Confederate troops under Joseph E. Johnston and G. W. Smith engaged Union forces under George B. McClellan at the Battle of Seven Pines outside Richmond, Virginia.
- 1902 – The Second Boer War came to an end with the signing of the Treaty of Vereeniging in Pretoria, South Africa.
- 1941 – The United Kingdom completed its re-occupation of Iraq, returning 'Abd al-Ilah to power as regent for Faisal II.
- 2005 – A Vanity Fair article revealed that the secret informant known as "Deep Throat", who had provided information about the Watergate scandal, was former FBI associate director Mark Felt (pictured).
- Géza II of Hungary (d. 1162)
- Walter Sickert (b. 1860)
- Jørgen Jensen (d. 1922)
Selected anniversaries / On this day archive
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Selected anniversaries for June
- 1660 – Mary Dyer (pictured) was hanged in Boston for repeatedly defying a law banning Quakers from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
- 1676 – Scanian War: The Swedish warship Kronan, one of the largest ships in the world at the time, sank at the Battle of Öland with the loss of around 800 men.
- 1861 – The first land battle of the American Civil War after Fort Sumter took place in the village of Fairfax, Virginia.
- 1942 – World War II: The crews of three Japanese submarines scuttled their vessels and committed suicide after entering Sydney Harbour and launching a failed attack.
- 2015 – The river cruise ship Dongfang zhi Xing capsized in the Yangtze, resulting in 442 deaths in China's worst peacetime maritime disaster.
- Marguerite Porete (d. 1310)
- Lady Clementina Hawarden (b. 1822)
- Parveen Kumar (b. 1942)
June 2: Festa della Repubblica in Italy (1946)
- 455 – After having removed Petronius Maximus from the imperial throne, Vandals led by Genseric entered Rome and began sacking the city for two weeks.
- 1802 – Henry Hacking killed the Aboriginal Australian resistance fighter Pemulwuy after Philip Gidley King ordered that he be brought in dead or alive.
- 1919 – First Red Scare: The anarchist followers of Luigi Galleani (pictured) set off eight bombs in eight cities across the United States.
- 1967 – Benno Ohnesorg, a German university student, was killed in West Berlin while protesting against the visit of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran, sparking the formation of the militant 2 June Movement.
- 1994 – The Royal Air Force suffered its worst peacetime disaster when a Chinook helicopter crashed on the Mull of Kintyre in Scotland, killing all 29 people on board.
- Ogata Kōrin (d. 1716)
- Adelaide Casely-Hayford (b. 1868)
- Fazal Ilahi Chaudhry (d. 1982)
June 3: Anniversary of Khomeini's Death in Iran (1989); Martyrs Day in Uganda
![Anfield, home of Liverpool F.C.](https://web.archive.org/web/20220808224603im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/66/Kop_of_Anfield_Liverpool.jpg/162px-Kop_of_Anfield_Liverpool.jpg)
- 1770 – Mission San Carlos Borromeo de Carmelo, a historic Catholic mission church in present-day Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, and the site of the first Christian confirmation in Alta California, was established.
- 1892 – Liverpool F.C. (stadium pictured), one of England's most successful football clubs, was founded.
- 1940 – Franz Rademacher, a Nazi official, proposed that the island of Madagascar be made available as a destination for the resettlement of the Jewish population of Europe.
- 1963 – Buddhist crisis: South Vietnamese Army soldiers attacked protesting Buddhists in Huế, with liquid chemicals from tear gas grenades, causing 67 people to be hospitalised.
- 1982 – A failed assassination attempt was made on Shlomo Argov, the Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom; this was later used as justification for the First Lebanon War.
- Staurakios (d. 800)
- Georges Bizet (d. 1875)
- Susannah Constantine (b. 1962)
June 4: Trianon Treaty Day in Romania (1920)
- 1561 – The spire of Old St Paul's Cathedral (depicted) in London was destroyed by fire, probably caused by lightning.
- 1784 – Élisabeth Thible became the first woman to fly in an untethered hot air balloon, covering 4 km (2.5 mi) and reaching an estimated 1,500 m (4,900 ft) altitude.
- 1920 – The Kingdom of Hungary lost 72 percent of its territory and 64 percent of its population with the signing of the Treaty of Trianon in Paris.
- 1942 – World War II: The Battle of Midway, a major battle of the Pacific War, began with a massive Japanese offensive on American forces on Midway Atoll.
- 1989 – Following the death of Ruhollah Khomeini, the Assembly of Experts elected Ali Khamenei to be Supreme Leader of Iran.
- Johan Rudolph Thorbecke (d. 1872)
- W. H. R. Rivers (d. 1922)
- Rodolfo Quezada Toruño (d. 2012)
June 5: First day of Shavuot (Judaism, 2022); Constitution Day in Denmark
- 663 – The Daming Palace in Chang'an became the seat of government and the royal residence of the Tang dynasty during the reign of Emperor Gaozong.
- 1305 – Raymond Bertrand de Got was elected Pope Clement V, succeeding Benedict XI, who died the previous year.
- 1862 – Vietnamese guerrilla leader Trương Định chose to fight on against European forces, defying Emperor Tự Đức and the Treaty of Saigon.
- 1963 – British politician John Profumo (pictured) admitted that he had lied to the House of Commons about his involvement in a sex scandal with Christine Keeler, and resigned from government.
- 1997 – Anticipating a coup attempt, President Pascal Lissouba of the Republic of the Congo ordered the detainment of his rival Denis Sassou Nguesso, initiating a second civil war.
- Johann Kuhnau (d. 1722)
- Theippan Maung Wa (b. 1899)
- Elizabeth Gloster (b. 1949)
June 6: Queen's Official Birthday in New Zealand (2022); National Day of Sweden; Western Australia Day (2022)
- 1749 – A plot by Muslim slaves in Malta to assassinate Manuel Pinto da Fonseca of the Knights Hospitaller was uncovered.
- 1822 – Alexis St. Martin, a Canadian voyageur, was accidentally shot in the stomach; medical investigations of his injury led to a greater understanding of the processes of digestion.
- 1894 – Governor Davis Hanson Waite ordered the Colorado state militia to protect and support miners engaged in a five-month strike in Cripple Creek.
- 1982 – Falklands War: The Royal Navy destroyer HMS Cardiff engaged and destroyed a British Army helicopter in a friendly-fire incident.
- 2017 – Syrian civil war: The Syrian Democratic Forces (soldiers pictured) opened the Second Battle of Raqqa, the final phase of the Raqqa campaign, capturing the de facto capital of the Islamic State four months later.
- Jeremy Bentham (d. 1832)
- Lillian Russell (d. 1922)
- David Scott (b. 1932)
June 7: Journalist's Day in Argentina (1810)
- 1692 – An earthquake registering approximately 7.5 Mw caused Port Royal, Jamaica, to sink below sea level and killed approximately 5,000 people.
- 1810 – Journalist Mariano Moreno (pictured) published Argentina's first newspaper, the Gazeta de Buenos-Ayres.
- 1917 – First World War: The British Army detonated 19 ammonal mines under German lines, killing 10,000 in the deadliest non-nuclear man-made explosion in history.
- 1948 – Anti-Jewish riots broke out in the French protectorate in Morocco, during which 44 people were killed and 150 injured.
- 1969 – The rock supergroup Blind Faith, featuring Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood and Ginger Baker, played their only UK show in London's Hyde Park in front of 100,000 fans.
- Roderigo Lopes (d. 1594)
- Joseph von Fraunhofer (d. 1826)
- Allen Iverson (b. 1975)
- 218 – Led by the inexperienced Gannys, Elagabalus's legions defeated the forces of Roman emperor Macrinus at the Battle of Antioch.
- 1826 – In York, Upper Canada, members of the Family Compact destroyed William Lyon Mackenzie's printing press in the Types Riot after Mackenzie accused them of corruption.
- 1929 – Margaret Bondfield (pictured) became the first female member of the Cabinet of the United Kingdom when she was named Minister of Labour by Ramsay MacDonald.
- 1972 – Vietnam War: Associated Press photographer Nick Ut took a Pulitzer Prize–winning photograph of a naked nine-year-old Phan Thi Kim Phuc fleeing after being burned by napalm.
- 1982 – Falklands War: The Argentine Air Force attacked British transport ships while unloading supplies off Bluff Cove in the Falkland Islands, killing 56 British servicemen and wounding 150 others.
- Harthacnut (d. 1042)
- Lucy Arbell (b. 1878)
- Irina Lăzăreanu (b. 1982)
- 1523 – Parisian printer Simon de Colines was fined for printing biblical commentary by Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples without obtaining prior approval from theologians.
- 1772 – In an act of defiance against the Navigation Acts, American colonists led by Abraham Whipple attacked and burned the British schooner Gaspee (depicted).
- 1856 – The first company of Mormon handcart pioneers left Iowa City for Salt Lake City, Utah.
- 1965 – Fighting began between the Viet Cong and the Army of the Republic of Vietnam in the Battle of Đồng Xoài, one of the largest battles in the Vietnam War.
- 2010 – A child suicide bomber attacked a wedding in Nadahan, Afghanistan, killing at least 40 people and injuring at least 70 others.
- William Feiner (d. 1829)
- Emma Louisa Turner (b. 1867)
- Hein Eersel (b. 1922)
- 1190 – Third Crusade: Frederick Barbarossa (pictured), Holy Roman Emperor, drowned in the Saleph River in Anatolia.
- 1692 – Bridget Bishop became the first person to be executed for witchcraft in the Salem witch trials in colonial Massachusetts.
- 1878 – The League of Prizren was officially founded to "struggle in arms to defend the wholeness of the territories of Albania".
- 1925 – The United Church of Canada, the country's largest Protestant denomination, held its inaugural service at the Mutual Street Arena in Toronto.
- 2008 – Sudan Airways Flight 109 crashed on landing at Khartoum International Airport, killing 30 of the 214 occupants on board.
- Theodor Philipsen (b. 1840)
- Margarito Bautista (b. 1878)
- Margaret Abbott (d. 1955)
June 11: Queen's Official Birthday in Tuvalu and the United Kingdom (2022)
- 1345 – Inspecting a new prison without being escorted by his bodyguard, the megas doux Alexios Apokaukos, chief minister of the Byzantine Empire, was lynched by the prisoners.
- 1847 – Prince Afonso (pictured) died at the age of two, leaving his father Pedro II, the last emperor of Brazil, without a male heir.
- 1962 – American criminals Clarence Anglin, John Anglin and Frank Morris escaped from Alcatraz Island, one of the United States' most famous prisons.
- 1982 – Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was released, and went on to set the record for the highest-grossing film of all time, which it held for 11 years.
- 2012 – Two earthquakes struck northern Afghanistan, triggering a massive landslide that buried a village and killed 75 people.
- Millicent Fawcett (b. 1847)
- Julius Evola (d. 1974)
- Taha Karaan (d. 2021)
June 12: Dia dos Namorados in Brazil; Independence Day in the Philippines (1898); Loving Day in the United States (1967)
- 1798 – Following the successful French invasion of Malta, the Knights Hospitaller surrendered Malta to Napoleon, initiating two years of occupation.
- 1899 – The New Richmond tornado killed 117 people and injured 125 others in the Upper Midwest region of the United States.
- 1942 – On her thirteenth birthday, Anne Frank (pictured) began keeping a diary during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands in World War II.
- 1991 – More than 150 Sri Lankan Tamil civilians were massacred by members of the military in the village of Kokkadichcholai.
- Thomas Farnaby (d. 1647)
- Egwale Seyon (d. 1818)
- Javed Miandad (b. 1957)
- 1525 – Martin Luther married Katharina von Bora, beginning the practice of clerical marriage in Protestantism.
- 1881 – The Jeannette expedition to reach the North Pole from the Pacific Ocean via the Bering Strait came to an end when the USS Jeannette (pictured) was finally crushed and sank after having been trapped in ice for almost two years.
- 1935 – In one of the biggest upsets in championship boxing, the underdog James J. Braddock defeated Max Baer to become the heavyweight champion of the world.
- 1952 – Soviet aircraft shot down a Swedish military plane carrying out signals-intelligence gathering operations, followed three days later by the shootdown of a second plane searching for the first one.
- 1983 – Pioneer 10 passed the orbit of Neptune, becoming the first man-made object to leave the proximity of the major planets of the Solar System.
- Mansur I (d. 976)
- Charles Algernon Parsons (b. 1854)
- Christo and Jeanne-Claude (b. 1935)
- 1777 – The Second Continental Congress adopted the stars and stripes design for the flag of the United States.
- 1822 – In a paper presented to the Royal Astronomical Society, English mathematician Charles Babbage proposed a difference engine (pictured), an automatic, mechanical calculator designed to tabulate polynomial functions.
- 1900 – The second of the German Naval Laws was passed, authorising the doubling in size of the Imperial German Navy.
- 1944 – Second World War: The British Army abandoned its attempt to capture the German-occupied city of Caen.
- 1966 – The Vatican formally abolished its 427-year-old list of prohibited books.
- Henry Vane the Younger (d. 1662)
- Karl Landsteiner (b. 1868)
- Mimi Parent (d. 2005)
- 763 BC – The Bur-Sagale eclipse was observed in Assyria, the earliest solar eclipse mentioned in historical sources that has been successfully identified.
- 1896 – An earthquake registering 8.5 Mw and subsequent tsunami struck Japan, killing at least 22,000 people and destroying about 9,000 homes.
- 1920 – Three African-American circus workers were lynched by a mob in Duluth, Minnesota, a crime that shocked the country for having taken place in the Northern United States.
- 1978 – King Hussein of Jordan married American Lisa Halaby, who became known as Queen Noor of Jordan (pictured).
- 2012 – American acrobat Nik Wallenda became the first person to walk a tightrope stretched directly over Niagara Falls.
- Eadburh of Winchester (d. 960)
- Antoine-François de Fourcroy (b. 1755)
- Choi Hong-hi (d. 2002)
June 16: Feast of Corpus Christi (Western Christianity, 2022)
- 632 – The final king of the Sasanian Empire of Iran, Yazdegerd III, ascended the throne at the age of eight.
- 1819 – A strong earthquake in the Kutch district of Gujarat, India, caused a local zone of uplift that dammed the Nara River, which was later named the Allah Bund ('Dam of God').
- 1904 – Irish author James Joyce began a relationship with Nora Barnacle, and subsequently used the date to set the actions for his 1922 novel Ulysses, commemorated as Bloomsday.
- 1972 – English musician David Bowie released his breakthrough album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
- 2012 – Liu Yang (pictured), a member of the Shenzhou 9 crew, became the first Chinese woman in space.
- Yang Jisheng (b. 1516)
- Mohammad Mosaddegh (b. 1882)
- Mel Allen (d. 1996)
- 1397 – The kingdoms of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway formed the Kalmar Union, a personal union under Eric of Pomerania.
- 1579 – Explorer Francis Drake landed in a region of present-day California, naming it New Albion and claiming it for England.
- 1795 – French Revolutionary Wars: Off the coast of Brittany, a Royal Navy squadron commanded by William Cornwallis (pictured) fended off a numerically superior French Navy fleet.
- 1952 – Guatemalan Revolution: The Guatemalan Congress passed Decree 900, redistributing unused land greater than 224 acres (0.91 km2) in area to local peasants.
- 2015 – A white supremacist committed a mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine people during a prayer service.
- M. C. Escher (b. 1898)
- Annie S. Swan (d. 1943)
- Grace Towns Hamilton (d. 1992)
- 1757 – Third Silesian War: The Austrian victory at the Battle of Kolín forced Prussian leader Frederick the Great to give up the Siege of Prague and retreat to Saxony.
- 1815 – War of the Seventh Coalition: Napoleon fought and lost his final battle, the Battle of Waterloo (depicted), in present-day Belgium.
- 1972 – British European Airways Flight 548 crashed near Staines-upon-Thames less than three minutes after departing from Heathrow Airport in London, killing all 118 people aboard in the worst air accident in the UK.
- 1982 – The body of Italian banker Roberto Calvi, nicknamed "God's Banker" due to his close association with the Holy See, was found hanging from scaffolding beneath London's Blackfriars Bridge.
- 2012 – Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud was appointed the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.
- Rogier van der Weyden (d. 1464)
- Isabella Rossellini (b. 1952)
- Kofoworola Abeni Pratt (d. 1992)
June 19: Juneteenth in the United States (1865)
- 1846 – The first officially recorded baseball game in U.S. history using modern rules was played in Hoboken, New Jersey, with the "New York Nine" defeating the New York Knickerbockers 23–1.
- 1867 – Second French intervention in Mexico: Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico was executed by firing squad in Querétaro City.
- 1965 – Nguyễn Cao Kỳ, the head of the South Vietnam Air Force, was appointed prime minister at the head of a military regime, ending two years of short-lived military juntas.
- 1970 – The international Patent Cooperation Treaty was signed, providing a unified procedure for filing patent applications to protect inventions in each of its contracting states.
- 2012 – Facing allegations of sexual assault in Sweden, Julian Assange (pictured), the founder of WikiLeaks, requested asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
- Guru Hargobind (b. 1595)
- Sarah Rosetta Wakeman (d. 1864)
- Aage Bohr (b. 1922)
- 1837 – Queen Victoria (pictured) acceded to the British throne, beginning a 63-year reign.
- 1926 – Approximately 250,000 spectators attended the opening procession of the 28th International Eucharistic Congress in Chicago, United States.
- 1959 – The extratropical remnants of an Atlantic hurricane reached the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Canada, causing 22 fishing boats to capsize and killing 35 people.
- 1960 – The Mali Federation gained independence from France, but dissolved into Mali and Senegal two months later.
- 1982 – The International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide, the first major conference in genocide studies, opened despite Turkish attempts to cancel it due to the inclusion of presentations on the Armenian genocide.
- Anna Laetitia Barbauld (b. 1743)
- Juan Larrea (d. 1847)
- Olympia Dukakis (b. 1931)
June 21: June solstice (14:54 UTC, 2023); Fête de la Musique; National Indigenous Peoples Day in Canada
- 1529 – War of the League of Cognac: The French army under Francis de Bourbon was destroyed in Lombardy, Italy, by the Spanish army.
- 1788 – New Hampshire ratified the U.S. Constitution and was admitted as the ninth U.S. state.
- 1921 – Irish War of Independence: The village of Knockcroghery, Ireland, was burned by British forces.
- Pope Leo IX (b. 1002)
- Joko Widodo (b. 1961)
- Soad Hosny (d. 2001)
- 1813 – War of 1812: After learning of a forthcoming American attack, Laura Secord walked 20 mi (32 km) from Queenston, Upper Canada, to warn British lieutenant James FitzGibbon (depicted).
- 1911 – King George V and Queen Mary of Teck were crowned at Westminster Abbey in London.
- 1966 – Vietnamese Buddhist activist leader Thích Trí Quang was arrested as the military junta of Nguyễn Cao Kỳ crushed the Buddhist Uprising.
- 2002 – An earthquake registering 6.5 Mw struck northwestern Iran, killing at least 230 people and injuring 1,300 others, and later causing widespread public anger at the slow official response.
- 2009 – Two Metro trains collided in Washington, D.C., killing nine people and injuring eighty others.
- Sayf al-Dawla (b. 916)
- Maximilian von Spee (b. 1861)
- Elizabeth Warren (b. 1949)
June 23: Grand Duke's Official Birthday in Luxembourg
- 1280 – Reconquista: Troops of the Emirate of Granada defeated those of the Kingdom of Castile and the Kingdom of León in the Battle of Moclín.
- 1594 – Anglo-Spanish War: During the Action of Faial, an English attempt to capture a Portuguese carrack, reputedly one of the richest ever to set sail from the Indies, caused it to explode with all the treasure lost.
- 1972 – President Richard Nixon signed Title IX (co-author Patsy Mink pictured) into law as part of the Education Amendments, prohibiting gender discrimination in any educational program receiving U.S. federal funds.
- 1982 – Chinese American Vincent Chin died after being beaten into a coma in Highland Park, Michigan, U.S., by two automotive workers who were angry about the success of Japanese auto companies.
- Frances McDormand (b. 1957)
- Sanjay Gandhi (d. 1980)
- Betty Shabazz (d. 1997)
- 474 – Western Roman emperor Glycerius, who was not recognized by his Eastern counterpart Leo I, was forced to abdicate.
- 1340 – Hundred Years' War: The English fleet commanded by Edward III almost completely destroyed the French fleet at the Battle of Sluys.
- 1932 – A group of military officers and civilians engineered a bloodless coup in Siam, ending the absolute rule of the Chakri dynasty.
- 1937 – The U.S. Navy's first two fast battleships, North Carolina and Washington, of the North Carolina class, were respectively ordered from the New York and Philadelphia Naval Shipyards.
- 2010 – Julia Gillard (pictured) was sworn in as the first female prime minister of Australia after incumbent Kevin Rudd declined to contest a leadership spill in the Labor Party.
- John Hampden (d. 1643)
- Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d'Argens (b. 1704)
- Minor White (d. 1976)
- 1658 – Anglo-Spanish War: The largest battle ever fought on Jamaica, the three-day Battle of Rio Nuevo, began.
- 1910 – The United States Congress passed the Mann Act, which prohibited the interstate transport of females for "immoral purposes".
- 1950 – The Korean War began with North Korean forces launching a pre-dawn raid over the 38th parallel into South Korea.
- 1967 – More than an estimated 400 million people viewed Our World, the first live international satellite television production.
- 2009 – Singer Michael Jackson (pictured) died as a result of the combination of drugs in his body.
- David Douglas (b. 1799)
- George Orwell (b. 1903)
- Hillel Slovak (d. 1988)
- 1243 – Mongol invasions of Anatolia: Mongols achieved a decisive victory over the Seljuq Turks, leading to the decline and disintegration of the Seljuk state.
- 1886 – French chemist Henri Moissan successfully isolated elemental fluorine (pictured in liquid state), for which he later won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
- 1907 – Organized by Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, among others, Bolshevik revolutionaries robbed a bank stagecoach in Tiflis, present-day Georgia.
- 1997 – J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, the first book in the Harry Potter fantasy novel series, is released.
- Marie Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin (b. 1699)
- Ebenezer Pemberton (d. 1835)
- David Goldblatt (d. 2018)
- 1869 – One day after surrendering at the Battle of Hakodate, Enomoto Takeaki turned the fort of Goryōkaku over to Japanese forces, signaling the collapse of the Republic of Ezo.
- 1899 – A. E. J. Collins scored 628 runs not out, the highest recorded score in cricket until being surpassed in 2016.
- 1976 – The first identifiable case of Ebola occurred in Sudan.
- 1994 – Members of the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo released sarin gas in Matsumoto, Nagano, killing eight people and injuring more than five hundred others.
- 2018 – The Japanese space probe Hayabusa2 (artist's impression pictured) arrived at the asteroid Ryugu to collect samples for return to Earth.
- Ranjit Singh (d. 1839)
- Guilhermina Suggia (b. 1885)
- Wanda Gág (d. 1946)
![Anna Pavlova as Giselle](https://web.archive.org/web/20220808224603im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/24/AnnaPavlovaAsGiselle.jpg/119px-AnnaPavlovaAsGiselle.jpg)
- 572 – Alboin, the king of the Lombards, was assassinated in Verona in a coup d'état instigated by the Byzantines.
- 1841 – Giselle (title role pictured), a ballet by the French composer Adolphe Adam, was first performed at the Théâtre de l'Académie Royale de Musique in Paris.
- 1904 – In the worst maritime disaster involving a Danish merchant ship, SS Norge ran aground on Hasselwood Rock and sank in the North Atlantic, resulting in more than 635 deaths.
- 1942 – World War II: The Wehrmacht launched Case Blue, a strategic German offensive to capture oil fields in the south of the Soviet Union.
- 1978 – In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the U.S. Supreme Court barred quota systems in college admissions but held that affirmative-action programs advantaging minorities were constitutional.
- James Tuchet, 7th Baron Audley (d. 1497)
- William Hooper (b. 1742)
- Franz Stangl (d. 1971)
June 29: Feast of Saints Peter and Paul (Western Christianity)
- 1613 – The original Globe Theatre in London burned to the ground after a cannon employed for special effects misfired during a performance of Henry VIII and ignited the roof.
- 1864 – A passenger train fell through an open swing bridge into the Richelieu River near present-day Mont-Saint-Hilaire, Quebec, killing as many as 99 people and injuring 100 others in Canada's worst railway accident (wreckage pictured).
- 1967 – Actress Jayne Mansfield, her boyfriend Sam Brody, and their driver were killed in a car accident outside of New Orleans, while her children Miklós, Zoltán, and Mariska Hargitay escaped with only minor injuries.
- 1995 – Atlantis became the first U.S. Space Shuttle to dock with the Russian space station Mir as part of the Shuttle–Mir program.
- Ludwig Beck (b. 1880)
- Charles Lyon Chandler (d. 1962)
- Jane Birdwood, Baroness Birdwood (d. 2000)
- 1860 – Seven months after the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species, prominent British scientists and philosophers participated in an evolution debate at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.
- 1894 – London's Tower Bridge (pictured), a combined bascule and suspension bridge over the River Thames, was inaugurated.
- 1922 – An agreement was signed to end the United States occupation of the Dominican Republic.
- 1960 – The Belgian Congo gained independence from colonial rule, beginning a period of instability that would lead to the dictatorship of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu.
- 2015 – An Indonesian Air Force military transport aircraft crashed near a residential neighborhood in Medan, killing 139 people.
- William Oughtred (d. 1660)
- Eleanor Sophia Smith (d. 1942)
- Tony Fernández (b. 1962)
Selected anniversaries / On this day archive
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Selected anniversaries for July
July 1: Canada Day (1867); Republic Day in Ghana (1960); Independence Day in Rwanda (1962)
- 1690 – Williamite forces defeated the Jacobites at the Battle of the Boyne near Drogheda, marking a turning point in the Williamite War in Ireland.
- 1922 – Seven of the sixteen American railroad labor organizations staged a nationwide strike (striking workers pictured) that lasted two months.
- 1979 – Sony introduced the Walkman, a portable audio player that changed listening habits by offering users the ability to play one's own choice of music.
- 2002 – Bashkirian Airlines Flight 2937 and DHL Flight 611 collided in mid-air over Überlingen, Germany, killing all 71 people aboard both aircraft.
- Alfonso VI of León and Castile (d. 1109)
- Nguyễn Đình Chiểu (b. 1822)
- Julia Higgins (b. 1942)
July 2: Feast day of Saints Martinian and Processus (Catholicism)
- 626 – During the Xuanwu Gate Incident, Prince Li Shimin led his forces to assassinate his rival brothers in a coup for the imperial throne of the Tang dynasty.
- 1816 – The French frigate Méduse ran aground off the coast of present-day Mauritania, with the survivors escaping on a makeshift raft, depicted in Théodore Géricault's painting The Raft of the Medusa (pictured).
- 1890 – The U.S. Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act, the first United States government action to limit monopolies.
- 1917 – Amidst weeks of race riots in East St. Louis, Illinois, white residents burned sections of the city and shot black inhabitants as they escaped the flames.
- 2013 – A Mw 6.1 strike-slip earthquake killed at least 35 people and injured 276 others in the Indonesian province of Aceh on the northern end of Sumatra.
- Theodoor Rombouts (b. 1597)
- Denmark Vesey (d. 1822)
- Maria Lourdes Sereno (b. 1960)
July 3: Independence Day in Belarus (1944)
- 324 – Civil wars of the Tetrarchy: Roman emperor Constantine the Great defeated his former colleague Licinius at the Battle of Adrianople.
- 1754 – French and Indian War: George Washington surrendered Fort Necessity in Pennsylvania, the only military surrender in his career.
- 1952 – SS United States (pictured) departed New York Harbor on her maiden voyage, on which completion she became the fastest ocean liner to cross the Atlantic.
- 1970 – Dan-Air Flight 1903 crashed into the slopes of the Montseny Massif in Catalonia, Spain, killing all 112 people aboard.
- 2005 – Same-sex marriage became legal in Spain with the coming into effect of a law passed by the Cortes Generales.
- Sir Robert Rich, 4th Baronet (b. 1685)
- Hasan Tahsini (d. 1881)
- Tom Cruise (b. 1962)
July 4: Feast day of Saint Ulrich of Augsburg (Catholicism); Republic Day in the Philippines (1946); Independence Day in the United States (1776)
- 414 – Byzantine emperor Theodosius II proclaimed his older sister Aelia Pulcheria as Augusta.
- 1054 – Chinese astronomers recorded the sudden appearance of a "guest star", later identified as the supernova that created the Crab Nebula.
- 1862 – In a boat on the River Thames from Oxford to Godstow, author Lewis Carroll told Alice Liddell (pictured) and her sisters a story that later formed the basis for his book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
- 1918 – World War I: Allied forces led by the Australian general John Monash won the Battle of Hamel, demonstrating the effectiveness of combined-arms techniques in trench warfare.
- 1982 – Four Iranian diplomats were kidnapped after they were stopped at a checkpoint in northern Lebanon by Lebanese Phalange forces; their fates remain unknown.
- Usama ibn Munqidh (b. 1095)
- Poundmaker (d. 1886)
- Andre Spitzer (b. 1945)
July 5: Fifth of July in New York
- 1841 – Thomas Cook, the founder of the British travel company Thomas Cook & Son, organised his first excursion, escorting about 500 people from Leicester to Loughborough.
- 1852 – Frederick Douglass gave his speech known as "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?", arguing that positive statements about liberty, citizenship, and freedom, were an offense to the enslaved population of the United States because of their lack of those things.
- 1937 – The Hormel Foods Corporation introduced Spam, the canned precooked meat product that would eventually enter into pop culture, folklore, and urban legend.
- 1950 – Korean War: In the first encounter between North Korean and American forces, an unprepared and undisciplined U.S. Army task force was routed at the Battle of Osan.
- 2012 – The Shard (pictured) in London was inaugurated as the tallest building in Europe, with a height of 310 m (1,020 ft), but was surpassed by Moscow's Mercury City Tower four months later.
- Nicéphore Niépce (d. 1833)
- Sophie Wyss (b. 1897)
- Kenneth Lay (d. 2006)
July 6: Independence Day in Malawi (1964)
- 1483 – The last monarch of the House of York and the Plantagenet dynasty, Richard III (pictured), was crowned King of England.
- 1614 – The Ottoman Empire made a final attempt to conquer the island of Malta, but were repulsed by the Knights Hospitaller.
- 1801 – French Revolutionary Wars: A Royal Navy squadron failed to eliminate a smaller French Navy squadron at Algeciras before they could join their Spanish allies.
- 1962 – The United States conducted the Sedan nuclear test as part of Project Plowshare, a program to investigate the use of nuclear explosions for civilian purposes.
- 1997 – The Troubles: In response to the Drumcree conflict, five days of unrest began in nationalist districts of Northern Ireland.
- Maria Luisa, Duchess of Lucca (b. 1782)
- Ethel Sands (b. 1873)
- Frida Kahlo (b. 1907)
- 1456 – Joan of Arc was declared innocent of heresy in a retrial twenty-five years after her death.
- 1798 – Outraged by the XYZ Affair, the United States rescinded its treaties with France, resulting in the undeclared Quasi-War, fought entirely at sea.
- 1954 – After the culmination of the 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état, Carlos Castillo Armas (pictured) was sworn in as president of Guatemala.
- 1963 – The secret police of Ngô Đình Nhu, brother and chief political adviser of South Vietnamese president Ngô Đình Diệm, attacked a group of American journalists who were covering a protest during the Buddhist crisis.
- 1983 – After writing a letter to Soviet premier Yuri Andropov, American schoolgirl Samantha Smith visited the Soviet Union as Andropov's personal guest, becoming known as "America's Youngest Ambassador".
- Gustav Mahler (b. 1860)
- Teresa Hsu (b. 1898)
- Syd Barrett (d. 2006)
July 8: Day of Arafah (Islam, 2022)
- 1663 – Charles II of England granted the Rhode Island Royal Charter, described as the "grandest instrument of human liberty ever constructed", to the Baptist minister John Clarke.
- 1709 – Great Northern War: Swedish forces under Charles XII were defeated by Russian troops led by Peter the Great at the Battle of Poltava (pictured), effectively ending Sweden's role as a major European power.
- 1758 – French and Indian War: French forces defeated the British at Fort Carillon on the shore of Lake Champlain in the British colony of New York.
- 1947 – Following reports of the capture of a "flying disc" by U.S. Army Air Forces personnel near Roswell, New Mexico, the military stated that the crashed object was a conventional weather balloon.
- 1962 – Following student protests at Rangoon University, Burmese general Ne Win ordered the demolition of the historic students' union building.
- Eli Lilly (b. 1838)
- Percy Grainger (b. 1882)
- Sky Ferreira (b. 1992)
July 9: First day of Eid al-Adha (Islam, 2022)
- 1763 – The Mozart family grand tour began, presenting child prodigies Maria Anna and Wolfgang (both pictured) in Western Europe.
- 1877 – The inaugural Wimbledon Championship, the world's oldest tennis tournament, began in London.
- 1896 – Politician William Jennings Bryan made his Cross of Gold speech advocating bimetallism, considered one of the greatest political speeches in American history.
- 1937 – Nitrate film being stored in a 20th Century Fox facility spontaneously combusted, destroying more than 40,000 reels of negatives and film prints.
- 1962 – In a seminal moment for pop art, Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans exhibition opened at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles.
- Ariwara no Narihira (d. 880)
- Elizabeth of Austria (b. 1526)
- John Archibald Wheeler (b. 1911)
July 10: Independence Day in the Bahamas (1973)
- 1372 – The Treaty of Tagilde was signed between Ferdinand I of Portugal and representatives of John of Gaunt of England, marking the beginning of the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance, which remains in effect today.
- 1645 – English Civil War: The Parliamentarians destroyed the last Royalist field army at the Battle of Langport, ultimately giving Parliament control of the west of England.
- 1942 – An American naval aviator discovered a downed Mitsubishi A6M Zero (pictured) on Akutan Island, Alaska, which was later rebuilt and flown to devise tactics against that type of aircraft.
- 2011 – The last edition of the British tabloid News of the World was published, closing due to allegations that it hacked the voicemails of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, victims of the 7/7 attacks and relatives of deceased British soldiers.
- Arthur Annesley, 1st Earl of Anglesey (b. 1614)
- Ima Hogg (b. 1882)
- Berthe Meijer (d. 2012)
- 1789 – French Revolution: Jacques Necker was dismissed as Director-General of Finances of France, sparking public demonstrations in Paris that led to the storming of the Bastille.
- 1833 – Yagan, a Noongar warrior wanted for leading attacks on British colonists in Western Australia, was killed, becoming a symbol of the unjust and sometimes brutal treatment of indigenous Australians by colonial settlers.
- 1936 – New York City's Triborough Bridge (pictured), the "biggest traffic machine ever built", opened to traffic.
- 2010 – The Islamist militia group Al-Shabaab carried out multiple suicide bombings in Kampala, Uganda, killing 74 people and injuring 85 others.
- Robert II, Count of Artois (d. 1302)
- Boris Grigoriev (b. 1886)
- Balaji Sadasivan (b. 1955)
- 927 – King Æthelstan of England secured the submission of four northern rulers: Constantine II of Scotland, Hywel Dda of Deheubarth, Ealdred I of Bamburgh, and Owain ap Dyfnwal of Strathclyde.
- 1488 – Choe Bu, an official of the Joseon dynasty, returned to Korea after months of shipwrecked travel in China.
- 1943 – World War II: German and Soviet forces engaged each other at the Battle of Prokhorovka (tanks pictured), one of the largest tank battles in military history.
- 1962 – The English rock band the Rolling Stones played their first concert, at the Marquee Club in London.
- Margaret Theresa of Spain (b. 1651)
- George Eastman (b. 1854)
- Elsie de Wolfe (d. 1950)
- 1831 – Wallachian officials adopted the Regulamentul Organic (cover shown), which engendered a period of unprecedented reforms that provided for the westernization of the local society.
- 1863 – Four days of rioting began in New York City in response to laws passed by the U.S. Congress to draft men to fight in the American Civil War.
- 1942 – World War II: The 1st Filipino Infantry Regiment was converted from a battalion to accommodate a larger number of volunteers spurred on by the Japanese invasion of the Philippines.
- 1962 – In an unprecedented reshuffle, British prime minister Harold Macmillan dismissed seven members of his Cabinet.
- 2008 – War in Afghanistan: Taliban guerrillas attacked U.S. troops at the Battle of Wanat in Nuristan Province.
- Margaret Murray (b. 1863)
- Kenneth Clark (b. 1903)
- Harrison Ford (b. 1942)
July 14: Bastille Day in France (1789); Festino di Santa Rosalia begins in Palermo, Italy
- 1789 – The Bastille, a fortress and prison in Paris, was stormed by a crowd during the flashpoint of the French Revolution.
- 1791 – The Priestley Riots (depicted), targeting religious dissenters such as Joseph Priestley, began in Birmingham, England.
- 1902 – The medieval St Mark's Campanile in Venice collapsed, also demolishing the Loggetta del Sansovino.
- 1950 – Early in the Korean War, North Korean troops began attacking the headquarters of the American 24th Infantry Division in Taejon, South Korea.
- Roy Inwood (b. 1890)
- Herbert Maryon (d. 1965)
- Constance Stokes (d. 1991)
- 1410 – The Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania defeated the Teutonic Knights at the Battle of Grunwald, the decisive engagement of the Polish–Lithuanian–Teutonic War.
- 1799 – French soldiers at Fort Julien, near the Egyptian port city of Rashid, uncovered the Rosetta Stone (pictured), an essential key in the decipherment of ancient Egyptian scripts.
- 1870 – Manitoba and the Northwest Territories were established following the transfer of Rupert's Land and the North-Western Territory from the Hudson's Bay Company to Canada.
- 2016 – The Peace at Home Council, a faction of the Turkish Armed Forces, staged a coup d'état attempt against the government and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
- Manuel Torres (d. 1822)
- Anton Chekhov (d. 1904)
- Betty Wagoner (b. 1930)
- 1232 – Muhammad ibn Yusuf, who later established the Emirate of Granada, the last Muslim state in Spain, was elected the ruler of Arjona.
- 1377 – The ten-year-old Richard II was crowned King of England at Westminster Abbey.
- 1950 – Korean War: A Korean People's Army unit massacred 31 prisoners of war of the U.S. Army on a mountain near the village of Tuman.
- 1994 – Fragments of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 began colliding with the planet Jupiter (impact site pictured), with the first impact causing a fireball that reached a peak temperature of 24,000 kelvin.
- 2004 – Millennium Park, a public park in Chicago, Illinois, and the world's largest rooftop garden, opened to the public.
- Charles I of Hungary (d. 1342)
- Albert Kesselring (d. 1960)
- Carli Lloyd (b. 1982)
July 17: Eid al-Ghadir (Shia Islam, 2022); Seventeenth of Tammuz (Judaism, 2022); Constitution Day in South Korea (1948); World Emoji Day
- 1453 – The Battle of Castillon, the last engagement of the Hundred Years' War, ended with the English losing all holdings in France except the Pale of Calais.
- 1850 – The first astrophotograph of a star other than the Sun, a daguerreotype of Vega (pictured), was taken by William Cranch Bond and John Adams Whipple.
- 1944 – Laden with munitions for World War II, two ships exploded at the Port Chicago Naval Magazine in California, killing 320 people and injuring more than 400 others.
- 1992 – Queen Elizabeth II officially opened the Manchester Metrolink, the first modern street-running light-rail system in the United Kingdom.
- 2014 – Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board.
- Eunice Newton Foote (b. 1819)
- Florence Fuller (d. 1946)
- Wong Kar-wai (b. 1958)
July 18: Marine Day in Japan (2022), International Mandela Day since 2009
- 1841 – Pedro II, the last emperor of Brazil, was crowned (depicted) at the Old Cathedral of Rio de Janeiro.
- 1936 – Nationalist rebels attempted a coup against the Second Spanish Republic, sparking the Spanish Civil War.
- 1995 – Selena's album Dreaming of You, instrumental in popularizing Tejano music, was released posthumously.
- 2012 – A suicide bomber attacked an Israeli tour bus at Burgas Airport, Bulgaria, resulting in the military branch of Hezbollah being designated a terrorist organization by the European Union.
- Jane Austen (d. 1817)
- Clare Stevenson (b. 1903)
- Priyanka Chopra (b. 1982)
- 1545 – The English warship Mary Rose (pictured) sank just outside Portsmouth during the Battle of the Solent.
- 1848 – The two-day Seneca Falls Convention, the first women's-rights and feminist convention held in the United States, opened in Seneca Falls, New York.
- 1957 – The largely autobiographical novel The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold by Evelyn Waugh was published.
- 1992 – A car bomb killed the anti-Mafia judge Paolo Borsellino and five policemen in Palermo, Italy, less than two months after the murder of Borsellino's friend and colleague Giovanni Falcone.
- 1997 – The Troubles: The Provisional Irish Republican Army announced that it would resume its ceasefire, ending its 28-year campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland.
- Philippa of Lancaster (d. 1415)
- William McSherry (b. 1799)
- Khawaja Nazimuddin (b. 1894)
- 1333 – Second War of Scottish Independence: The Scottish-held town of Berwick-upon-Tweed surrendered to English forces, ending a siege led by King Edward III (depicted).
- 1950 – Korean War: After a month-long campaign, much of the North Korean air force was destroyed by United Nations forces.
- 1982 – Members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army detonated two bombs in Hyde Park and Regent's Park in London, killing eleven British Army personnel and seven horses.
- 1997 – USS Constitution, one of the United States Navy's original six frigates, sailed for the first time in 116 years after a full restoration.
- 2012 – A gunman carried out a mass shooting at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, killing 12 people and injuring 58 others.
- Tom Crean (b. 1877)
- Heather Chasen (b. 1927)
- Gisele Bündchen (b. 1980)
July 21: Belgian National Day (1831)
- 1378 – Unrepresented labourers revolted and violently took over the government of the Republic of Florence, demanding that they be granted political office.
- 1952 – An earthquake registering 7.3 Mw struck the southern San Joaquin Valley in California, causing 12 deaths and an estimated $60 million in property damage.
- 1959 – The inaugural International Mathematical Olympiad, the leading mathematical competition for pre-university students, began in Romania.
- 1960 – Sirimavo Bandaranaike (pictured) was elected the prime minister of Ceylon, becoming the world's first democratically elected female head of government.
- 1977 – Libyan forces carried out a raid at Sallum, sparking a four-day war with Egypt.
- Fiammetta Wilson (d. 1920)
- Louis Vauxcelles (d. 1943)
- Rilwanu Lukman (d. 2014)
July 22: Feast day of Saint Mary Magdalene (Christianity)
- 838 – Arab–Byzantine wars: The forces of the Abbasid Caliphate defeated Byzantine troops led by Emperor Theophilos at the Battle of Anzen, near present-day Dazman, Turkey.
- 1209 – A crusader army captured Béziers, France, and massacred the city's inhabitants in the first major military action of the Albigensian Crusade.
- 1691 – Williamite forces defeated the Jacobites at the Battle of Aughrim, the decisive battle of the Williamite War in Ireland.
- 1802 – Gia Long (pictured) conquered Hanoi and unified modern-day Vietnam, which had experienced centuries of feudal warfare.
- 1997 – Written and illustrated by Eiichiro Oda, One Piece, the best-selling manga series in history, debuted in Weekly Shōnen Jump.
- Emma Lazarus (b. 1849)
- Selena Gomez (b. 1992)
- George Armitage Miller (d. 2012)
July 23: Eid al-Mubahalah (Shia Islam, 2022); Birthday of Haile Selassie (Rastafari)
- 1829 – William Austin Burt was awarded a patent for the typographer, the first practical typewriting machine.
- 1927 – Wilfred Rhodes of England and Yorkshire became the only person to play in 1,000 first-class cricket matches.
- 1942 – The Holocaust: The gas chambers at Treblinka extermination camp began operation, killing 6,500 Jews who had been transported from the Warsaw Ghetto the day before.
- 1982 – A helicopter crashed during the filming of Twilight Zone: The Movie in Valencia, California, killing three people and leading to new safety standards.
- 1995 – Hale–Bopp (pictured), one of the most widely observed comets of the 20th century, was independently discovered by astronomers Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp.
- John Babcock (b. 1900)
- Vera Rubin (b. 1928)
- Olivia Manning (d. 1980)
July 24: Pioneer Day in Utah, United States (1847)
- 1411 – Scottish clansmen led by Donald of Islay, Lord of the Isles, and Alexander Stewart, Earl of Mar, fought the Battle of Harlaw (monument pictured) near Inverurie, Scotland.
- 1980 – The Australian swimming team, nicknamed the Quietly Confident Quartet, won the men's 4 × 100 metre medley relay at the Moscow Olympics.
- 2009 – MV Arctic Sea, declared to be carrying a cargo of timber, was allegedly boarded by hijackers off the coast of Sweden in an incident that remains incompletely explained.
- 2014 – Fifty minutes after departing Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, Air Algérie Flight 5017 disappeared from radar; its wreckage was found the next day in Mali, with no survivors of the 116 people aboard.
- Princess Charlotte of Prussia (b. 1860)
- Martin Van Buren (d. 1862)
- Marjorie Cameron (d. 1995)
![Don Bradman, captain of the 1948 Australia cricket team](https://web.archive.org/web/20220808224603im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/19/Bradman%26Bat.jpg/140px-Bradman%26Bat.jpg)
- 306 – Constantine the Great was proclaimed Roman emperor by his troops after the death of Constantius Chlorus.
- 1261 – Nicaean–Latin wars: Alexios Strategopoulos led Nicaean forces to recapture Constantinople, leading to the reestablishment of the Byzantine Empire and the end of the Latin Empire.
- 1898 – Spanish–American War: After more than two months of sea-based bombardment, the United States invaded Puerto Rico.
- 1948 – Australia (captain pictured) set a world record for the highest successful run-chase in Test cricket history during the Fourth Test of the Ashes series against England.
- 1976 – The orbiting spacecraft Viking 1 took a photograph of an apparent face on Mars in a classic example of pareidolia.
- Francis Chan (b. 1913)
- Rosalind Franklin (b. 1920)
- Nestor Makhno (d. 1934)
July 26: Independence Day in Liberia (1847)
![King Edward VIII unveiling the statue Canada Bereft on the Vimy Memorial](https://web.archive.org/web/20220808224603im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/80/Edward_VIII_unveils_the_figure_of_Canada_on_the_Vimy_Ridge_Memorial.jpg/162px-Edward_VIII_unveils_the_figure_of_Canada_on_the_Vimy_Ridge_Memorial.jpg)
- 1759 – French and Indian War: Rather than defend Fort Carillon, near present-day Ticonderoga, New York, from approaching British forces, French brigadier general François-Charles de Bourlamaque withdrew his troops and attempted to blow up the fort.
- 1936 – The Canadian National Vimy Memorial (unveiling pictured), dedicated to the Canadian Expeditionary Force members killed in the First World War, was unveiled in Pas-de-Calais, France.
- 1968 – After coming second to Nguyễn Văn Thiệu in a rigged presidential election, Trương Đình Dzu was jailed by a South Vietnamese military court for illicit currency transactions.
- 2016 – A former employee carried out a mass stabbing at a care home for disabled people in Sagamihara, Japan, killing 19 people and wounding 26 others.
- George Bernard Shaw (b. 1856)
- Asif Ali Zardari (b. 1955)
- Kate Beckinsale (b. 1973)
- 1054 – During his invasion of Scotland, Siward, Earl of Northumbria, defeated Macbeth, King of Scotland, in an engagement north of the Firth of Forth.
- 1214 – Philip II of France decisively won the Battle of Bouvines (pictured), the conclusive battle of the 1213–1214 Anglo-French War.
- 1942 – Second World War: Allied forces halted the Axis invasion of Egypt at the First Battle of El Alamein.
- 1949 – The de Havilland Comet, the world's first commercial jet airliner to reach production, made its maiden flight.
- 1983 – American musician Madonna released her self-titled debut album, which set the standard for the genre of dance-pop for decades.
- Conrad II of Italy (d. 1101)
- Elizabeth Rona (d. 1981)
- A. P. J. Abdul Kalam (d. 2015)
July 28: Statehood Day in Ukraine (2022)
- 1148 – Crusades: The siege of Damascus ended in a decisive victory for the Muslims, leading to the disintegration of the Second Crusade.
- 1911 – The Australasian Antarctic Expedition began with the departure of SY Aurora (pictured) from London.
- 1939 – During the excavation of a 7th-century ship burial at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, England, archaeologists discovered a helmet that is widely associated with King Rædwald of East Anglia.
- 1940 – At the Salzburg Conference, German dictator Adolf Hitler demanded the replacement of much of Slovakia's cabinet.
- 1995 – Two followers of the Indian mystic Rajneesh were convicted of a 1985 plot to assassinate Charles Turner, the U.S. attorney for the District of Oregon.
- Lucy Burns (b. 1879)
- Baruch Samuel Blumberg (b. 1925)
- Clara Ng (b. 1973)
- 1014 – Byzantine–Bulgarian wars: Byzantine forces defeated troops of the Bulgarian Empire at the Battle of Kleidion in the mountains of Belasica near present-day Klyuch.
- 1818 – French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel (pictured) submitted a memoir on the diffraction of light to the Royal Academy of Sciences, providing strong support for the wave theory of light.
- 1914 – The first shots of World War I were fired by the Austro-Hungarian river monitor SMS Bodrog on Serbian defences near Belgrade.
- 1954 – The first part of J. R. R. Tolkien's high-fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings was published by Allen & Unwin.
- Ivan Aivazovsky (b. 1817)
- Isabel, Princess Imperial of Brazil (b. 1846)
- Isidor Isaac Rabi (b. 1898)
July 30: Islamic New Year (2022, 1444 AH)
![José Nasazzi, Uruguay captain](https://web.archive.org/web/20220808224603im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/16/Jose_nasazzi_urug.jpg/114px-Jose_nasazzi_urug.jpg)
- 1865 – Off the coast of Crescent City, California, the steamer Brother Jonathan struck an uncharted rock and sank, killing 225 people; its cargo of gold coins was not retrieved until 1996.
- 1930 – Uruguay (captain pictured) defeated Argentina 4–2 at the Estadio Centenario in Montevideo to win the inaugural FIFA World Cup.
- 1950 – At the height of a political crisis known as the royal question, four workers were shot dead by the Belgian Gendarmerie at a strike in Grâce-Berleur.
- 1975 – American labor-union leader Jimmy Hoffa disappeared after last being seen outside a restaurant near Detroit.
- 1981 – Amid a widespread economic crisis and food shortages in Poland, up to 50,000 people, mostly women and children, took part in the largest of nationwide hunger demonstrations in Łódź.
- Tatwine (d. 734)
- Walter Schuck (b. 1920)
- Hope Solo (b. 1981)
July 31: Lā Hae Hawaiʻi (Flag Day) and Lā Hoʻihoʻi Ea (Sovereignty Restoration Day) in Hawaii (1843)
- 1777 – The Second Continental Congress passed a resolution commissioning the Marquis de Lafayette (pictured) as a major general in the American revolutionary forces.
- 1966 – The pleasure cruiser MV Darlwyne disappeared off the coast of Cornwall with the loss of all 31 people aboard.
- 1972 – The Troubles: Hours after the British Army's Operation Motorman brought an end to the autonomous self-declared area of Free Derry in Northern Ireland, three car bombs exploded in the village of Claudy.
- 2000 – Three years after being hit by a mudslide, the Ten Thousand Buddhas Monastery in Hong Kong fully reopened.
- 2012 – The largest power outage in history occurred across 22 Indian states, affecting more than 620 million people, or about 9 percent of the world's population.
- William S. Clark (b. 1826)
- Cho Ki-chon (d. 1951)
- J. K. Rowling (b. 1965)
Selected anniversaries / On this day archive
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Selected anniversaries for August
August 1: Lughnasadh and Imbolc in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, respectively; Buwan ng Wika begins in the Philippines
- 527 – Upon the death of Justin I, his nephew and adopted son Justinian I became the sole ruler of the Byzantine Empire.
- 1798 – French Revolutionary Wars: The Battle of the Nile, between a British fleet commanded by Horatio Nelson and a French fleet under François-Paul Brueys d'Aigalliers, began at Aboukir Bay off the Egyptian coast.
- 1971 – The Concert for Bangladesh, a pair of benefit concerts organised by George Harrison and Ravi Shankar for refugees of the Bangladesh genocide, took place at Madison Square Garden in New York.
- 1984 – Commercial peat cutters discovered a preserved bog body, now known as Lindow Man (head pictured), at Lindow Moss in Cheshire, England.
- Maria Mitchell (b. 1818)
- Herman Melville (b. 1819)
- Kurmanbek Bakiyev (b. 1949)
August 2: Roma Holocaust Memorial Day
- 338 BC – An allied army led by Philip II of Macedon overcame the forces of city-states led by Athens and Thebes at the Battle of Chaeronea, securing Macedonian hegemony over the majority of ancient Greece.
- 1916 – An explosion, blamed on Austro-Hungarian saboteurs, sank the Italian dreadnought Leonardo da Vinci.
- 1939 – Leo Szilard (pictured) penned a letter, signed by Albert Einstein and addressed to U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, warning that Germany may develop atomic bombs, leading to the establishment of the Manhattan Project.
- 1947 – Star Dust, a British South American Airways airliner, crashed into Mount Tupungato in the Argentine Andes; its wreckage was not found until 1998.
- Jack L. Warner (b. 1892)
- Marija Bursać (b. 1920)
- Billy Cannon (b. 1937)
- 1857 – Indian Rebellion: An eight-day siege of a fortified outbuilding in Arrah occupied by 68 defenders against more than 10,000 men ended when a relief party dispersed the besiegers.
- 1903 – Macedonian rebels in Kruševo proclaimed a republic, which existed for ten days before Ottoman forces destroyed the town.
- 1913 – An agricultural workers' strike in Wheatland degenerated into a riot, becoming one of the first major farm-labor confrontations in California.
- 1940 – World War II: Italian forces began a conquest of British Somaliland, capturing the region in 16 days.
- 1997 – The Sky Tower (pictured), the tallest free-standing structure in the Southern Hemisphere at 328 m (1,076 ft), opened in Auckland, New Zealand.
- Hamilton Fish (b. 1808)
- Tony Bennett (b. 1926)
- Frumka Płotnicka (d. 1943)
- 1265 – Second Barons' War: Royal troops led by Prince Edward defeated baronial forces under Simon de Montfort at the Battle of Evesham in Worcestershire, England.
- 1704 – War of the Spanish Succession: A combined Anglo-Dutch fleet under the command of George Rooke and allied with Archduke Charles captured Gibraltar (pictured) from Spain.
- 1830 – American surveyor James Thompson produced the first plat of Chicago for the Illinois and Michigan Canal Commissioners.
- 2020 – A large explosion of ammonium nitrate stored at the Port of Beirut in Lebanon killed 218 people and caused US$15 billion in damage.
- Laura Knight (b. 1877)
- Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother (b. 1900)
- David Lange (b. 1942)
August 5: Victory and Homeland Thanksgiving Day in Croatia (1995)
![Guangwu depicted in the Sancai Tuhui](https://web.archive.org/web/20220808224603im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/41/Guangwudi-Ming-Image1.jpg/122px-Guangwudi-Ming-Image1.jpg)
- AD 25 – Guangwu (depicted) claimed the throne as the emperor of the Han dynasty after Wang Mang, who had seized the throne himself and proclaimed the Xin dynasty, died when peasant rebels besieged Chang'an.
- 1916 – First World War: The British Empire's Sinai and Palestine campaign began with a victory at the Battle of Romani.
- 1949 – An earthquake registering 6.4 Ms struck near Ambato, Ecuador, killing 5,050 people.
- 1962 – American actress and model Marilyn Monroe was found dead of a barbiturate overdose in her home in Brentwood, Los Angeles.
- 2012 – An American white supremacist carried out a mass shooting at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, killing six people and wounding four others.
- Euthymius I of Constantinople (d. 917)
- Edvard August Vainio (b. 1853)
- Ruth Asawa (d. 2013)
- 1777 – The Battle of Oriskany, one of the bloodiest battles of the American Revolutionary War, was fought about 6 mi (10 km) east of Fort Stanwix, New York.
- 1945 – World War II: The U.S. Army Air Force bomber Enola Gay (pictured with crew) dropped the Little Boy atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, killing about 70,000 people instantly.
- 1965 – U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, outlawing literacy tests and other discriminatory voting practices that had been responsible for the widespread disfranchisement of African Americans.
- 2008 – Mauritanian President Sidi Mohamed Ould Cheikh Abdallahi was ousted from power by a group of high-ranking generals that he had dismissed from office several hours earlier.
- Stephen V of Hungary (d. 1272)
- George Kenney (b. 1889)
- Vera Farmiga (b. 1973)
August 7: Day of Tasu'a (Shia Islam, 2022); Tisha B'Av (Judaism, 2022); Assyrian Martyrs Day (1933)
- 768 – The papacy of Stephen III, who convened the Lateran Council of 769, began.
- 1461 – Ming Chinese general Cao Qin staged a failed coup against the Tianshun Emperor.
- 1914 – The Battle of Mulhouse began with France's first attack of World War I in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to recover the region of Alsace from Germany.
- 1942 – World War II: U.S. Marines initiated the first American offensive of the Guadalcanal campaign, with landings on Tulagi (pictured), Gavutu–Tanambogo and Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.
- 1985 – Five members of the Bamber family were found murdered at a farmhouse in Tolleshunt D'Arcy, England.
- Jin Shengtan (d. 1661)
- Art Houtteman (b. 1927)
- Frances Oldham Kelsey (d. 2015)
August 8: Day of Ashura (Shia Islam, 2022)
- 1264 – Reconquista: In the early stages of the Mudéjar revolt, Muslim rebels captured the alcázar of the city of Jerez in present-day Spain, holding it for about two months.
- 1919 – The Third Anglo-Afghan War ended with the United Kingdom signing a treaty to recognise the independence of the Emirate of Afghanistan.
- 1929 – The German airship Graf Zeppelin (pictured) departed Lakehurst, New Jersey, on a flight to circumnavigate the world.
- 2009 – Nine people died when a tour helicopter and a small private airplane collided over the Hudson River in Hoboken, New Jersey.
- 2014 – The World Health Organization declared the Western African Ebola virus epidemic, which began in December 2013, to be a public health emergency of international concern.
- Earle Page (b. 1880)
- Ernest Lawrence (b. 1901)
- Sheila Varian (b. 1937)
August 9: International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples; National Women's Day in South Africa (1956)
- 1902 – In a ceremony at Westminster Abbey, Edward VII and Alexandra were crowned King and Queen of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor and Empress of India.
- 1942 – The Blue Lotus, the fifth volume of The Adventures of Tintin by the Belgian cartoonist Hergé and noted for its emphasis on countering negative misconceptions of Chinese people, began serialisation.
- 1944 – The United States Forest Service authorized the use of Smokey Bear as its mascot to replace Bambi.
- 1960 – Led by Albert Kalonji, South Kasai, a state of the Republic of the Congo (Léopoldville), declared its unrecognised secession.
- 1965 – The state of Singapore (flag pictured) was expelled from the Malaysian federation due to a heated ideological conflict between their respective ruling parties.
- Stephen of Anjou (d. 1354)
- Evelina Haverfield (b. 1867)
- Albert Ketèlbey (b. 1875)
- 1628 – The Swedish warship Vasa sank shortly after departing Stockholm on her maiden voyage to take part in the Thirty Years' War.
- 1844 – From measurements of its motion, German astronomer Friedrich Bessel deduced that Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, had an unseen companion (both pictured).
- 1864 – José Antônio Saraiva announced that the Brazilian military would exact reprisals after Uruguay's governing Blanco Party refused Brazil's demands, beginning the Uruguayan War.
- 1897 – German chemist Felix Hoffmann discovered an improved method of synthesizing aspirin.
- 2007 – Amid large protests against the impending demolition of the Queen's Pier, in Hong Kong, the High Court dismissed legal attempts to preserve the landmark.
- Al-Wathiq (d. 847)
- William Lowndes Yancey (b. 1814)
- Angus Lewis Macdonald (b. 1890)
August 11: Raksha Bandhan (Hinduism, 2022); Independence Day in Chad (1960)
- 106 – The region of Dacia, comprising parts of modern Romania, became a province of the Roman Empire.
- 1309 – Reconquista: Aragonese forces led by King James II landed on the coast of Almería, beginning an ultimately unsuccessful siege of the city, held at the time by the Emirate of Granada.
- 1786 – Francis Light founded George Town, the first British settlement in Southeast Asia and the present-day capital of the Malaysian state of Penang.
- 1952 – King Talal of Jordan was forced to abdicate due to health reasons and was succeeded by his eldest son Hussein (pictured).
- 2012 – At least 306 people were killed and 3,000 others injured in a pair of earthquakes near Tabriz, Iran.
- 'John Hunyadi (d. 1456)
- Enid Blyton (b. 1897)
- Jacqueline Fernandez (b. 198)
August 12: Tu B'Av (Judaism, 2022)
- 1099 – The First Crusade concluded with the Battle of Ascalon and Fatimid forces under Al-Afdal Shahanshah retreating to Egypt.
- 1883 – The last known quagga (example pictured), a subspecies of the plains zebra, died at the Natura Artis Magistra zoo in Amsterdam.
- 1945 – An official administrative history of the Manhattan Project, written by American physicist Henry DeWolf Smyth, was released to the public days after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
- 2000 – The Oscar-class submarine K-141 Kursk of the Russian Navy suffered an on-board explosion and sank in the Barents Sea during a military exercise.
- 2016 – The state-owned Taedonggang Brewing Company opened the first beer festival in North Korea.
- Guy de Beauchamp (d. 1315)
- Archduchess Isabella Clara of Austria (b. 1629)
- Maurice Fernandes (b. 1897)
August 13: Independence Day in the Central African Republic (1960)
- 582 – Maurice was crowned to succeed Byzantine emperor Tiberius II Constantine, who then died the following day.
- 1762 – Anglo-Spanish War: The United Kingdom captured Havana after a five-week siege, holding it until the Treaty of Paris the following year.
- 1876 – The Bayreuth Festival, now known for showcasing the stage works of Richard Wagner, was inaugurated under direction of him and his wife Cosima.
- 1999 – The Act on National Flag and Anthem was adopted, formally establishing the Hinomaru (design illustrated) and "Kimigayo" as the Japanese national flag and anthem, respectively.
- 2004 – Hurricane Charley struck the U.S. state of Florida, just 22 hours after Tropical Storm Bonnie inflicted its own damage to the state.
- Jules Massenet (d. 1912)
- Frederick Sanger (b. 1918)
- Tigran Petrosian (d. 1984)
August 14: Independence Day in Pakistan (1947)
- 1264 – War of Saint Sabas: A Genoese fleet captured or sank most of the ships of a Venetian trade convoy off the coast of Albania.
- 1842 – American Indian Wars: American general William J. Worth declared the Second Seminole War to be over
- 1888 – One of the first music recordings ever made, of Arthur Sullivan's "The Lost Chord" (audio featured), was played at a press conference introducing Thomas Edison's phonograph in London.
- 2010 – The inaugural edition of the Youth Olympic Games opened in Singapore for athletes between 14 and 18 years old.
- 2013 – Egyptian security forces raided two camps of ousted president Mohamed Morsi's supporters in Cairo, leading to the death of at least 595 civilians and forcing the government to declare a state of emergency.
- Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (b. 1892)
- Hugh Trumble (d. 1938)
- Mila Kunis (b. 1983)
August 15: Independence Day in India (1947); National Liberation Day of Korea (1945)
- 718 – Forces of the Umayyad Caliphate abandoned their year-long siege of Constantinople, causing the caliphate to give up its goal of conquering the Byzantine Empire.
- 1038 – Upon the death of his uncle Stephen I, Peter became the second king of Hungary.
- 1942 – World War II: The tanker SS Ohio reached Malta, as part of an operation to deliver much-needed supplies during the Siege of Malta.
- 1947 – Jawaharlal Nehru (pictured) took office as the Prime Minister of India, a post he held for 18 years.
- 1998 – A car bomb attack carried out by the Real Irish Republican Army killed 29 people and injured approximately 220 others in Omagh, Northern Ireland.
- Gerty Cori (b. 1896)
- Bernard Fanning (b. 1969)
- Ben Affleck (b. 1972)
- 1819 – In Manchester, England, around 15 people were killed and 400 to 700 others injured when cavalry charged into a crowd who were demanding the reform of parliamentary representation.
- 1942 – During the deportation of Jews from Slovakia, president Jozef Tiso gave a speech describing Jews as "parasites" and "the eternal enemy".
- 1945 – The Stanley Internment Camp in Hong Kong was liberated as a result of the Japanese surrender in World War II.
- 1962 – The Beatles fired drummer Pete Best and replaced him with Ringo Starr (pictured).
- 1986 – Typhoon Wayne formed over the South China Sea, going on to become one of the longest-lived tropical cyclones at 21 days, and kill 490.
- Ranavalona I (d. 1861)
- Georgette Heyer (b. 1902)
- Marian Rejewski (b. 1905)
August 17: Independence Day in Indonesia (1945)
- 1424 – Hundred Years' War: Allied English and Burgundian forces gained a strategically important victory at the bloody Battle of Verneuil in Normandy, France.
- 1676 – Scanian War: Swedish forces defeated Danish troops at the Battle of Halmstad, the last battle in Halland between the two countries.
- 1907 – Pike Place Market (pictured), one of the oldest continuously operated public farmers' markets in the U.S. and a popular tourist attraction, opened in Seattle, Washington.
- 2009 – A hydroelectric turbine at the Sayano-Shushenskaya Dam in Russia catastrophically failed, flooding the turbine hall, killing 75 people and causing widespread power outages.
- Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen (d. 1676)
- Leslie Groves (b. 1896)
- Thierry Henry (b. 1977)
August 18: Krishna Janmashtami (Hinduism, 2022)
- 1783 – A meteor procession blazed across the night sky over Great Britain.
- 1891 – A hurricane struck the Caribbean island of Martinique, killing about 700 people, injuring at least 1,000 others, and causing severe damage.
- 1920 – The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (authors pictured) was ratified, guaranteeing women's suffrage in the country.
- 1966 – Vietnam War: Members of the 6th Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment were surrounded by a much larger Viet Cong unit at the Battle of Long Tan, but held them off for several hours until reinforcements arrived.
- 2008 – Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf resigned under pressure from a movement to impeach him.
- Genghis Khan (d. 1227)
- Baji Rao I (b. 1700)
- Cameron White (b. 1983)
- 1274 – Shortly after his return from the Ninth Crusade, Edward I (pictured) was crowned King of England at Westminster Abbey, nearly two years after his father's death.
- 1759 – Seven Years' War: At the Battle of Lagos, British ships, having damaged several French vessels the previous day, pursued the remainder of the fleet to Lagos, Portugal, and continued the battle there in violation of Portuguese neutrality.
- 1934 – A referendum supported the recent merging of the posts of Chancellor and President of Germany, consolidating Adolf Hitler's assumption of supreme power.
- 1978 – The Cinema Rex in Abadan, Iran, was set on fire, leading to the death of at least 420 people.
- 2005 – Thunderstorms in southern Ontario, Canada, spawned at least three tornadoes that caused over C$500 million in damage.
- Jan Fyt (b. 1609)
- Tom Wills (b. 1835)
- Bill Clinton (b. 1946)
- 1710 – War of the Spanish Succession: A Spanish Bourbon army commanded by the Marquis de Bay was soundly defeated by a multinational army led by the Austrian commander Guido Starhemberg.
- 1794 – American troops defeated the Northwestern Confederacy, a Native American alliance, at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, the decisive battle of the Northwest Indian War.
- 1909 – Pluto (pictured) was photographed for the first time at the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, U.S., 21 years before it was officially discovered by Clyde Tombaugh.
- 1971 – The Stanford prison experiment, one of the most infamous psychological studies, was ended after six days, when the simulation became too abusive.
- 1989 – After colliding with a dredger on the River Thames in London, the pleasure steamer Marchioness sank in just thirty seconds, killing 51 people.
- Jeremi Wiśniowiecki (d. 1651)
- H. P. Lovecraft (b. 1890)
- B. K. S. Iyengar (d. 2014)
- 1716 – Seventh Ottoman–Venetian War: The Ottoman Empire suddenly abandoned its siege of the city of Corfu, allowing the Republic of Venice to preserve its rule over the Ionian Islands.
- 1808 – Peninsular War: British–Portuguese forces put an end to the first French invasion of Portugal at the Battle of Vimeiro.
- 1911 – Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa (pictured) was stolen from the Louvre by museum employee Vincenzo Peruggia and was not recovered until two years later.
- 1971 – Six people were killed during an escape attempt and riot at California's San Quentin State Prison; the subsequent trial of six inmates was the longest in state history at the time.
- 1986 – A limnic eruption of Lake Nyos in Cameroon released a cloud of carbon dioxide, suffocating 1,746 people and 3,500 livestock.
- Juan de Tassis, 2nd Count of Villamediana (d. 1622)
- Jules Michelet (b. 1798)
- Stephen Hillenburg (b. 1961)
August 22: Madras Day in Chennai, India
![Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field by James William Edmund Doyle](https://web.archive.org/web/20220808224603im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/05/A_Chronicle_of_England_-_Page_453_-_Richard_III_at_Bosworth.jpg/161px-A_Chronicle_of_England_-_Page_453_-_Richard_III_at_Bosworth.jpg)
- 1485 – Lancastrian forces under Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, defeated Yorkist forces under Richard III of England at the Battle of Bosworth Field (depicted), decisively ending the Wars of the Roses.
- 1711 – Queen Anne's War: A British attempt to attack Quebec failed when eight ships wrecked on the St. Lawrence River.
- 1851 – The yacht America won the Cup of One Hundred Sovereigns race, later renamed the America's Cup, near the Isle of Wight, England.
- 1961 – Ida Siekmann jumped from a window in her tenement building trying to flee to West Berlin, becoming the first person to die at the Berlin Wall.
- 1985 – A fire broke out on British Airtours Flight 28M, causing 55 deaths mostly due to smoke inhalation and bringing about changes to make aircraft evacuation more effective.
- Maria Cunitz (d. 1664)
- George Herriman (b. 1880)
- Madame Nhu (b. 1924)
- 1514 – Ottoman forces defeated the Safavids at the Battle of Chaldiran, gaining control of eastern Anatolia and northern Iraq.
- 1898 – The Southern Cross Expedition (dogsled team pictured), the first British venture of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration, departed London.
- 1914 – In their first major action of the First World War, the British Expeditionary Force engaged German troops in Mons, Belgium.
- 1944 – King Michael dismissed the pro-Axis government of General Ion Antonescu, placing Romania on the side of the Allies for the remainder of World War II.
- 2011 – A 5.8 MW earthquake struck the Piedmont region of Virginia, and was felt by more people than any other quake in U.S. history.
- Ebussuud Efendi (d. 1574)
- Minna Craucher (b. 1891)
- Keith Moon (b. 1946)
August 24: Feast day of Saint Bartholomew the Apostle (Western Christianity); Independence Day in Ukraine (1991)
- 1781 – American Revolutionary War: Near present-day Aurora, Indiana, American Indians led by Joseph Brant killed or captured all members of a Pennsylvania militia.
- 1821 – The Treaty of Córdoba was signed, ratifying the Plan of Iguala and concluding the Mexican War of Independence with Spain.
- 1921 – The Royal Navy's R.38, the world's largest airship at the time, was destroyed by a structural failure over Hull, killing 44 of the 49 crew aboard.
- 1941 – Adolf Hitler ordered the suspension of the T4 euthanasia program of the mentally ill and disabled, although killings continued in secret for the remainder of World War II.
- 2006 – The International Astronomical Union redefined the term planet, thus reclassifying Pluto (pictured) as a dwarf planet due to not having "cleared the neighbourhood" around its orbit.
- Henry VII, Holy Roman Emperor (d. 1313)
- Zonia Baber (b. 1862)
- Rupert Grint (b. 1988)
- 1258 – George Mouzalon, the regent of the Empire of Nicaea, was assassinated as part of a conspiracy led by nobles under the future emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos.
- 1609 – Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei demonstrated his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers.
- 1758 – Seven Years' War: Prussian forces engaged the Russians at the Battle of Zorndorf in present-day Sarbinowo, Poland.
- 1941 – Second World War: Soviet, British and Commonwealth armed forces invaded Iran to secure oil fields and Allied supply lines for the Soviet Union.
- 2001 – American singer Aaliyah (pictured) and several members of her record company were killed when their overloaded aircraft crashed shortly after taking off from Marsh Harbour Airport in the Bahamas.
- Gennadius of Constantinople (d. 471)
- Charles Richet (b. 1850)
- Velma Caldwell Melville (d. 1924)
August 26: Heroes' Day and Herero Day in Namibia; Women's Equality Day in the United States
- 1071 – Byzantine–Seljuk wars: Seljuk Turks led by Alp Arslan captured Byzantine emperor Romanos IV at the Battle of Manzikert.
- 1748 – The first Lutheran denomination in North America, the Pennsylvania Ministerium, was founded in Philadelphia.
- 1968 – The Beatles released "Hey Jude", which became the then-longest single to top the UK charts.
- 1978 – Aboard the Soviet Soyuz 31 spacecraft, Sigmund Jähn (pictured) became the first German in space.
- 2008 – After a ceasefire was reached in the Russo-Georgian War, Russia recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
- Humilis of Bisignano (b. 1582)
- Arnold Fothergill (b. 1854)
- Mildred Albert (d. 1991)
August 27: Independence Day in Moldova (1991)
- 1776 – British forces led by William Howe defeated the Continental Army under George Washington at the Battle of Long Island, the largest battle of the American Revolutionary War.
- 1896 – In the shortest recorded war in history, the Sultanate of Zanzibar surrendered to the United Kingdom after less than an hour of conflict.
- 1964 – South Vietnamese junta leader Nguyễn Khánh (pictured) entered into a triumvirate power-sharing arrangement with rival generals Trần Thiện Khiêm and Dương Văn Minh, who had both been involved in plots to unseat Khánh.
- 2003 – Mars made its closest approach to Earth in nearly 60,000 years, passing within approximately 55,758,000 kilometres (34,650,000 mi).
- Josquin des Prez (d. 1521)
- Samuel C. Pomeroy (d. 1891)
- Ieva Simonaitytė (d. 1978)
- 1789 – With the first use of his new 1.2-metre (3.9 ft) telescope, then the largest in the world, William Herschel discovered a new moon of Saturn, later named Enceladus.
- 1833 – The Slavery Abolition Act 1833, officially abolishing slavery in most of the British Empire, received royal assent.
- 1901 – Silliman University in Dumaguete, Philippines, was founded as the first American educational institution in Asia.
- 1963 – American civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. (pictured) delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech, envisioning a future in which blacks and whites coexisted harmoniously as equals.
- 1973 – Swedish police used gas bombs to end a seven-day hostage situation in Stockholm; during the incident the hostages had bonded with their captors, leading to the term Stockholm syndrome.
- Johannes Banfi Hunyades (d. 1646)
- Vittorio Sella (b. 1859)
- Béla Guttmann (d. 1981)
August 29 Feast day for the Beheading of John the Baptist (Gregorian calendar)
- 1786 – Led by Daniel Shays, farmers in western Massachusetts angered by high tax burdens and disfranchisement began an armed uprising (depicted) against the U.S. federal government.
- 1885 – Gottlieb Daimler patented the world's first internal-combustion motorcycle, the Reitwagen.
- 1949 – The Soviet Union conducted its first nuclear weapons test, detonating the 22-kiloton RDS-1.
- 1991 – Italian businessman Libero Grassi was killed by the Sicilian Mafia in Palermo after taking a public stand against their extortion demands.
- 1996 – Vnukovo Airlines Flight 2801 crashed on approach to Svalbard Airport, Norway, killing all 141 on board.
- Charles of Taranto (d. 1315)
- Edmond Hoyle (d. 1769)
- Vivien Thomas (b. 1910)
August 30: Victory Day in Turkey (1922)
- AD 70 – First Jewish–Roman War: The Siege of Jerusalem ended with Roman forces entering and sacking the Lower City, destroying the Second Temple.
- 526 – Upon the death of her father Theodoric the Great, Amalasuintha (pictured) of the Ostrogoths became the regent for her ten-year-old son Athalaric.
- 1914 – World War I: The Battle of Tannenberg resulted in the almost complete destruction of the Russian 2nd Army by the German 8th Army.
- 1974 – An express train carrying foreign workers from Yugoslavia to West Germany derailed in Zagreb, killing 153 people.
- 2014 – Prime minister of Lesotho Tom Thabane fled to South Africa, claiming that the army had launched a coup d'état.
- Hervey le Breton (d. 1131)
- Theodor Svedberg (b. 1884)
- Oliver Sacks (d. 2015)
August 31: Ganesh Chaturthi begins (Hinduism, 2022); Independence Day in Malaysia (1957); Romanian Language Day in Romania
- 1876 – Sultan Murad V of the Ottoman Empire was deposed after a reign of 93 days on grounds of mental illness.
- 1897 – Thomas Edison was granted a patent for the Kinetoscope (pictured), a precursor to the modern movie projector.
- 1907 – Russia and the United Kingdom signed the Anglo-Russian Convention, defining their respective spheres of interest in Persia, Afghanistan, and Tibet.
- 1941 – World War II: A detachment of Chetniks captured the town of Loznica in German-occupied Serbia.
- 1969 – On the final day of the Isle of Wight Festival, an event attended by approximately 150,000 people over three days, Bob Dylan appeared in his first gig since 1966.
- Aidan of Lindisfarne (d. 651)
- Alma Mahler (b. 1879)
- Norman Kirk (d. 1974)
Selected anniversaries / On this day archive
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Selected anniversaries for September
- 1529 – Sancti Spiritu, the first European settlement in Argentina, was destroyed by Amerindians.
- 1859 – A powerful solar flare caused a coronal mass ejection that struck Earth a few hours later, generating the most intense geomagnetic storm ever recorded and causing bright aurorae visible in the middle latitudes.
- 1914 – The passenger pigeon, which once numbered in the billions, became extinct when the last individual died in captivity.
- 1973 – A 76-hour multinational rescue effort in the Irish Sea resulted in the deepest sub rescue in history (pictured).
- 1983 – A Soviet jet interceptor shot down the civilian Korean Air Lines Flight 007 near the island of Sakhalin in the north Pacific, killing all 246 passengers and 23 crew on board.
- Ferenc Gyulay (b. 1799; d. 1868)
- Walter Reuther (b. 1907)
- Margaret Mary Vojtko (d. 2013)
September 2: National Day in Vietnam (1945)
![Japanese foreign minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signing the Instrument of Surrender](https://web.archive.org/web/20220808224603im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/94/Mamoru_Shigemitsu_signs_the_Instrument_of_Surrender%2C_officially_ending_the_Second_World_War.jpg/156px-Mamoru_Shigemitsu_signs_the_Instrument_of_Surrender%2C_officially_ending_the_Second_World_War.jpg)
- 47 BC – Caesarion, a possible son of Julius Caesar, became the last king of the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt, ruling jointly with his mother Cleopatra.
- 1885 – White miners in Rock Springs, Wyoming, attacked Chinese-American immigrants, killing at least 28 Chinese miners and causing approximately $150,000 in property damage.
- 1945 – On the deck of the U.S. Navy battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay, representatives from the Empire of Japan and the Allied powers signed the Japanese Instrument of Surrender (pictured), formally ending World War II.
- 2011 – Bad weather caused a Chilean Air Force aircraft to crash into the Pacific Ocean, killing all 21 people on board.
- Constantius III (d. 421)
- Jean Victor Marie Moreau (d. 1813)
- Carlos Valderrama (b. 1961)
- 36 BC – The Sicilian revolt against the Second Triumvirate of the Roman Republic ended when the fleet of Sextus Pompey, the rebel leader, was defeated at the Battle of Naulochus.
- 1651 – English Parliamentarian forces under Oliver Cromwell (pictured) won the Battle of Worcester, the final battle of the English Civil War.
- 1901 – The flag of Australia flew for the first time from the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne.
- 1936 – The Guild of Carillonneurs in North America was founded in Parliament Hill, Ottawa, Canada.
- 2001 – The Troubles: Ulster loyalists resumed a picket outside a Catholic girls' primary school in the Protestant portion of Ardoyne, in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
- Umar al-Aqta (d. 863)
- Percy Chapman (b. 1900)
- Pauline Kael (d. 2001)
![Damage from the Canterbury earthquake in Christchurch](https://web.archive.org/web/20220808224603im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a1/Worcester_corner_Manchester.jpg/172px-Worcester_corner_Manchester.jpg)
- 476 – Germanic leader Odoacer captured Ravenna and deposed Emperor Romulus Augustus, marking the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
- 1839 – First Opium War: British vessels opened fire on Chinese war junks enforcing a food sales embargo on the British community on the Kowloon Peninsula.
- 1912 – The Albanian revolt ended when the Ottoman government agreed to meet most of the rebels' demands.
- 1957 – Governor Orval Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard to prevent nine African-American students from attending Little Rock Central High School.
- 2010 – A 7.1 Mw earthquake struck New Zealand's South Island (damage pictured), causing up to NZ$40 billion in damages.
- Maria of Castile, Queen of Aragon (d. 1458)
- Bert Olmstead (b. 1926)
- Beyoncé (b. 1981)
September 5: Labour Day in Canada and Labor Day in the United States (2022)
- 917 – Liu Yan declared himself emperor, establishing the state of Southern Han at his capital of Panyu (present-day Guangzhou) in southern China.
- 1697 – Nine Years' War: A French warship captured York Factory, a trading post of the Hudson's Bay Company in present-day Manitoba, Canada.
- 1836 – Sam Houston (pictured) became the first popularly elected president of the Republic of Texas.
- 1905 – Under the mediation of U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt, the Russo-Japanese War officially ended with the signing of a treaty at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine.
- 1943 – World War II: American and Australian airborne forces landed at Nadzab as part of the New Guinea campaign against Japan.
- Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy (b. 1817)
- Sarah Emma Edmonds (d. 1898)
- Freddie Mercury (b. 1946)
September 6: Defence Day in Pakistan (1965)
- 1634 – A Swedish–German army was overwhelmingly defeated at the Battle of Nördlingen, one of the most important battles of the Thirty Years' War, effectively destroying Swedish power in Southern Germany.
- 1870 – Louisa Swain (pictured) became the first woman in the United States to vote in a general election.
- 1963 – The Kennedy administration sent Victor H. Krulak and Joseph Mendenhall on a mission to assess the progress of the Vietnam War.
- 1995 – Cal Ripken Jr. played his 2,131st consecutive Major League Baseball game, breaking the 56-year-old record set by Lou Gehrig.
- 2018 – The Supreme Court of India invalidated part of Section 377 of the Penal Code, thus legalising homosexuality in India.
- Isabella Leonarda (b. 1620)
- Frederick Abel (d. 1902)
- Wendi Richter (b. 1961)
- 1159 – Pope Alexander III was chosen as the successor of Adrian IV in a disputed election.
- 1778 – Anglo-French War: France invaded the Caribbean island of Dominica and captured its British fort before Britain had even learned of the Franco-American alliance.
- 1927 – American inventor Philo Farnsworth (pictured) transmitted the first images using his all-electronic television system.
- 1965 – Indo-Pakistani War: The Pakistan Navy began a raid on the Indian coastal town of Dwarka in its first engagement against India.
- 2011 – Yak-Service Flight 9633, carrying the players and coaching staff of the ice hockey team Lokomotiv Yaroslavl, crashed on take-off near Yaroslavl, Russia, resulting in the deaths of 44 of the 45 people on board.
- Robert Estienne (d. 1559)
- Emil Korytko (b. 1813)
- Michael DeBakey (b. 1908)
September 8: Victory Day in Malta
- 617 – Li Yuan defeated a Sui dynasty army in the Battle of Huoyi, opening the path to his capture of the imperial capital Chang'an and the eventual establishment of the Tang dynasty.
- 1796 – French Revolutionary Wars: The French defeated Austrian forces in Bassano, Venetia, Italy.
- 1921 – In Atlantic City, New Jersey, Margaret Gorman (pictured) was crowned the "Golden Mermaid", the forerunner to the Miss America pageant.
- 1936 – Opposed to António de Oliveira Salazar's support of the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, the crews of the Portuguese Navy ships NRP Afonso de Albuquerque and NRP Dão mutinied while anchored in the harbour of Lisbon.
- 1966 – Queen Elizabeth II opened the Severn Bridge, suggesting that it marked the dawn of a new economic era for South Wales.
- Amy Robsart (d. 1560)
- Anne Catherine Emmerich (b. 1774)
- Ron "Pigpen" McKernan (b. 1945)
- 337 – After disposing of all relatives who possibly held a claim to the throne, Constantine II, Constantius II and Constans became Roman co-emperors.
- 1791 – The commissioners overseeing the construction of the United States' new capital city named it Washington, D.C., in honor of the first president.
- 1939 – World War II: About 3,000 Polish Army troops began a nearly month-long defence of the Hel Peninsula during the German invasion of Poland.
- 1971 – Imagine, the second solo album by John Lennon (pictured), was released.
- 2001 – Ahmad Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance, was assassinated in Afghanistan.
- Eleanor de' Medici (d. 1611)
- Mary Hunter Austin (b. 1868)
- Jacques Lacan (d. 1981)
September 10: Mid-Autumn Festival (traditional Chinese calendar, 2022); first day of Sukkot (Judaism, 2022)
- 1509 – A strong earthquake occurred in the Sea of Marmara, devastating much of Constantinople and causing at least 1,000 deaths.
- 1897 – A sheriff's posse fired on a peaceful labor demonstration mostly comprising Polish- and Slovak-American anthracite coal miners in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, killing 19 people and wounding many others.
- 1946 – While riding a train to Darjeeling, India, Sister Teresa Bojaxhiu, later Mother Teresa (pictured), experienced what she later described as the "call within the call", directing her to "leave the convent and help the poor while living among them".
- 1961 – At the Italian Grand Prix at Monza, German driver Wolfgang von Trips's car collided with another, causing it to become airborne and crash into a side barrier, killing him and 15 spectators.
- Bob Heffron (b. 1890)
- Gunpei Yokoi (b. 1941)
- Jon Brower Minnoch (d. 1983)
September 11: National Day of Catalonia
![One of five memorials in Mountain Meadows to the victims of the massacre](https://web.archive.org/web/20220808224603im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/72/2014_MMM_Women%2C_Children%2C_and_Wounded_Monument_-_25_June_2015.jpg/123px-2014_MMM_Women%2C_Children%2C_and_Wounded_Monument_-_25_June_2015.jpg)
- 1226 – The first instance of the Catholic practice of perpetual Eucharistic adoration formally began in Avignon, France.
- 1697 – Great Turkish War: Forces led by Prince Eugene of Savoy decisively defeated Ottoman troops at the Battle of Zenta in present-day Serbia, ending the Turkish threat to Europe.
- 1851 – In a fight near Christiana, Pennsylvania, a group of escaped slaves and free Blacks led by William Parker fought off a federal posse seeking to arrest and return the escapees to slavery.
- 1914 – First World War: The Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force invaded German New Guinea, winning the Battle of Bita Paka.
- 1981 – Iranian politician Ayatollah Madani and three others were assassinated by an agent of the MEK who detonated a grenade during Friday prayers in Tabriz.
- John Ireland (bapt. 1838)
- Matsunosuke Onoe (d. 1926)
- Masih Alinejad (b. 1976)
- 379 – Yax Nuun Ahiin I took the throne as the ruler (ajaw) of the Mayan city of Tikal.
- 1848 – Switzerland became a federal state with the adoption of the Swiss Federal Constitution.
- 1910 – Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 8, one of the largest-scale choral works in the classical concert repertoire and popularly known as the "Symphony of a Thousand", was first performed in Munich (1916 performers pictured).
- 1952 – Three boys in Flatwoods, West Virginia, U.S., reported seeing a ten-foot-tall (3 m) monster in the woods while investigating a UFO.
- 2015 – An explosion involving illegally stored mining detonators in Petlawad, India, killed 104 people and injured more than 150 others.
- Andronikos I Komnenos (d. 1185)
- Mary Bosanquet Fletcher (b. 1739)
- Tarana Burke (b. 1973)
September 13: Feast day of Saint John Chrysostom (Western Christianity)
- 1541 – After three years of exile, John Calvin returned to Geneva to reform the church under a body of doctrine later known as Calvinism.
- 1814 – War of 1812: Fort McHenry in Baltimore's Inner Harbor was attacked by British forces during the Battle of Baltimore, inspiring Francis Scott Key to write "Defence of Fort McHenry", later used as the lyrics to the United States national anthem.
- 1848 – An explosion drove an iron rod through the head of railroad foreman Phineas Gage, making him an important early case of personality change after brain injury.
- 1914 – World War I: The French army repulsed a German assault against their positions on high ground near the city of Nancy.
- 1959 – The Soviet spacecraft Luna 2 (model pictured) impacted the Moon, becoming the first spacecraft to reach another celestial body.
- 1971 – The Attica Prison riot ended when New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller ordered the storming of the prison, in which 38 people died by gunfire.
- 2008 – Five bomb blasts took place in Delhi, India, killing at least 20 people as part of a series of attacks perpetrated by the Indian Mujahideen.
- William Birdwood (b. 1865)
- Claude-Hélène Perrot (b. 1928)
- Luiz Gushiken (d. 2013)
- AD 81 – Domitian, the last Flavian emperor of Rome, was confirmed by the Senate to succeed his brother Titus.
- 1901 – Theodore Roosevelt became President of the United States at age 42, the youngest person ever to do so, eight days after William McKinley was fatally wounded in Buffalo, New York.
- 1914 – HMAS AE1 (pictured), the Royal Australian Navy's first submarine, was lost at sea; its wreck was not found until 2017.
- 2019 – Drone attacks on major processing facilities at Abqaiq and Khurais forced Saudi Arabia to cut more than half of its oil production.
- Franz Bopp (b. 1791)
- Paul Poberezny (b. 1921)
- Faith Leech (d. 2013)
September 15: Battle of Britain Day in the United Kingdom (1940)
- 1791 – French playwright Olympe de Gouges published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, hoping to expose the failures of the French Revolution in the recognition of gender equality.
- 1916 – Tanks (example pictured), the "secret weapons" of the British Army during the First World War, were first used in combat at the Battle of Flers–Courcelette in France.
- 1944 – World War II: American and Australian forces landed on the Japanese-occupied island of Morotai.
- 2017 – A homemade bomb partially exploded on an eastbound District line train at Parsons Green tube station in West London, injuring 30 passengers.
- Edmé Boursault (d. 1701)
- Charles-Amédée Kohler (d. 1874)
- Signe Toly Anderson (b. 1941)
September 16: Arbaʽeen / Arbaʽeen Pilgrimage (Shia Islam, 2022)
- 1776 – American Revolutionary War: American colonists defeated British troops at the Battle of Harlem Heights on the island of Manhattan.
- 1822 – French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel, in a "note" read to the Academy of Sciences, reported a direct refraction experiment verifying David Brewster's hypothesis that photoelasticity (as we now call it) is stress-induced birefringence.
- 1961 – Typhoon Nancy, which possibly had the strongest winds ever measured in a tropical cyclone, made landfall in Muroto, Japan.
- 1975 – The prototype of the Mikoyan MiG-31 (example pictured), one of the fastest combat jets in the world, made its maiden flight.
- 1979 – Eight people escaped from East Germany to West Germany in a home-made hot-air balloon.
- 2013 – A lone gunman fatally shot twelve people and injured three others at the headquarters of the Naval Sea Systems Command in Washington, D.C.
- Mikhail Kutuzov (b. 1745)
- Miriam Benjamin (b. 1861)
- Louis Réard (d. 1984)
September 17: Constitution Day in the United States (1787)
- 1793 – War of the Pyrenees: Forces from the French Army of the Eastern Pyrenees defeated two divisions of the Army of Catalonia, ending the furthest Spanish encroachment in their invasion of Roussillon.
- 1849 – Harriet Tubman (pictured) escaped from slavery in the U.S. state of Maryland, and later orchestrated the rescues of other slaves via the Underground Railroad.
- 1939 – World War II: The Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, sixteen days after Nazi Germany's attack on the country from the west.
- 1980 – Solidarity, a Polish trade union, was founded as the first independent labor union in an Eastern Bloc country.
- 2011 – Adbusters, a Canadian anti-consumerist publication, organized a protest against corporate influence on democracy at Zuccotti Park in New York City that became known as Occupy Wall Street.
- Robert Bellarmine (d. 1621)
- Vera Yevstafievna Popova (b. 1867)
- Red Skelton (d. 1997)
September 18: Banned Books Week begins (2022); Battle of Britain Day in Canada (2022)
- 324 – Constantine the Great decisively defeated Licinius in the Battle of Chrysopolis, establishing Constantine's sole control over the Roman Empire and ending the Tetrarchy.
- 1879 – The Blackpool Illuminations (example pictured) in the English seaside town of Blackpool were switched on for the first time.
- 1948 – The Australian cricket team's Invincibles tour of England concluded; they had played 34 matches, including five Tests, without defeat.
- 1961 – A plane crashed under mysterious circumstances near Ndola in Northern Rhodesia, resulting in the deaths of United Nations secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld and 15 others on board.
- 2001 – Five letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to various media outlets in the United States.
- Henry Stafford, 1st Baron Stafford (b. 1501)
- André Dacier (d. 1722)
- Jamey Rodemeyer (d. 2011)
September 19: International Talk Like a Pirate Day
- 1777 – American Revolutionary War: British troops engaged American forces at the first Battle of Saratoga in New York.
- 1846 – French shepherd children Mélanie Calvat and Maximin Giraud reported a Marian apparition, now known as Our Lady of La Salette (statue pictured), near La Salette-Fallavaux.
- 1893 – New Zealand became the first country to introduce universal suffrage following the women's suffrage movement led by Kate Sheppard.
- 1991 – Ötzi, a well-preserved natural mummy of a man dating from about 3300 BC, was discovered by two German tourists in the Alps.
- 2011 – Mariano Rivera surpassed Trevor Hoffman to become Major League Baseball's all-time leader in the number of saves.
- William Robertson (b. 1721)
- Mabel Vernon (b. 1883)
- Jackie Collins (d. 2015)
- 1066 – Harald III of Norway and his English ally Tostig Godwinson defeated the northern earls Edwin and Morcar at the Battle of Fulford near York.
- 1792 – The French Army achieved its first major victory in the War of the First Coalition at the Battle of Valmy.
- 1971 – Hurricane Irene (satellite image pictured) moved into the Pacific Ocean from the Atlantic, making it the first actively tracked tropical cyclone to do so.
- 1977 – A series of celestial phenomena of disputed nature was observed in the western Soviet Union, Finland and Denmark.
- 2011 – The United States military ended its "don't ask, don't tell" policy, consequently allowing gay and lesbian people to serve openly.
- Maurice Benyovszky (b. 1746)
- John Patteson (d. 1871)
- Erich Hartmann (d. 1993)
September 21: International Day of Peace
- 1675 – Led by Antonio de Vea, a Spanish naval expedition departed El Callao, Peru, for the fjords and channels of Patagonia to find whether rival colonial powers were in the region.
- 1823 – According to Joseph Smith, he was first visited by the Angel Moroni (pictured), who would guide him to the golden plates that became the basis of the Book of Mormon.
- 1968 – The Soviet Union's Zond 5 landed in the Indian Ocean, becoming the first spacecraft to safely return to Earth after circling the Moon.
- 2001 – With racial tensions high after the September 11 attacks, a gang of British Muslim youths in Peterborough, England, murdered 17-year-old Ross Parker.
- Leonello d'Este, Marquis of Ferrara (b. 1407)
- Charles Nicolle (b. 1866)
- Jacqueline Susann (d. 1974)
- 1236 – Livonian Crusade: The Livonian Brothers of the Sword were soundly defeated by pagan Samogitian and Semigallian troops at the Battle of Saule.
- 1857 – Lefort, a Russian ship of the line, sank in the Gulf of Finland during a sudden squall with the loss of all 826 people on board.
- 1948 – Led by Gail Halvorsen, the United States Air Force began Operation "Little Vittles", delivering candy to children as part of the Berlin Airlift.
- 1957 – François "Papa Doc" Duvalier (pictured) was elected President of Haiti as a populist before consolidating power and ruling as a dictator for the rest of his life.
- 2014 – The NASA spacecraft MAVEN entered into orbit around Mars to study the planet's atmosphere.
- Selim I (d. 1520)
- Bernardino António Gomes Jr. (b. 1806)
- Gladys Berejiklian (b. 1970)
September 23: Celebrate Bisexuality Day
- 1780 – American Revolutionary War: British officer John André was captured by Patriot forces, thereby revealing a plot by Continental Army general Benedict Arnold to hand over West Point, New York.
- 1889 – Fusajiro Yamauchi founded Nintendo in Kyoto, Japan (original headquarters pictured), to produce handmade hanafuda playing cards.
- 2008 – A gunman shot and killed ten students at the Seinäjoki University of Applied Sciences in Kauhajoki, Finland, before committing suicide.
- 2019 – The British travel company Thomas Cook Group ceased operations with immediate effect, leaving around 600,000 tourists stranded around the world.
- John Ainsworth Horrocks (d. 1846)
- Paul Delvaux (b. 1897)
- Sean Spicer (b. 1971)
September 24: Heritage Day in South Africa
- 1645 – English Civil War: Royalists under the personal command of King Charles I suffered a significant defeat at the Battle of Rowton Heath.
- 1841 – Raja Muda Hashim, the uncle of Bruneian sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin II, conceded land to British adventurer James Brooke, establishing the Raj of Sarawak.
- 1877 – At the Battle of Shiroyama (depicted), the final engagement of the Satsuma Rebellion, the Imperial Japanese Army defeated rebel samurai of the Satsuma Domain led by Saigō Takamori.
- 2019 – The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom unanimously ruled that Prime Minister Boris Johnson's advice to Queen Elizabeth II that Parliament should be prorogued was unlawful.
- Guru Ram Das (b. 1534)
- F. Scott Fitzgerald (b. 1896)
- Linda McCartney (b. 1941)
- 1237 – Henry III of England and Alexander II of Scotland signed the Treaty of York, establishing the Anglo-Scottish border, which mostly remains the same today.
- 1396 – Ottoman wars in Europe: Ottoman forces under Bayezid I defeated a Christian alliance led by Sigismund of Hungary near present-day Nikopol, Bulgaria.
- 1800 – French Revolutionary Wars: After U.S. ships became involved, French forces abandoned their invasion of the Batavian island of Curaçao.
- 1944 – Second World War: British troops began their withdrawal from the Battle of Arnhem in the Netherlands, ending the Allies' Operation Market Garden in defeat.
- 1981 – Sandra Day O'Connor (pictured) became the first female justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
- Billy Hughes (b. 1862)
- Johannes Brost (b. 1946)
- Marian Breland Bailey (d. 2001)
September 26: First day of Rosh Hashanah (Judaism, 2022, AM 5783)
- 1493 – Pope Alexander VI issued the papal bull Dudum siquidem, the last of the Bulls of Donation, marking the beginning of the Spanish colonization of the Americas.
- 1580 – Explorer Francis Drake's galleon Golden Hind (replica pictured) sailed into Plymouth, England, completing his circumnavigation of the globe.
- 1917 – World War I: The Battle of Polygon Wood, part of the Battle of Passchendaele, began near Ypres, Belgium.
- 1933 – As gangster Machine Gun Kelly surrendered to the FBI, he supposedly shouted "Don't shoot, G-Men!", which became a nickname for FBI agents.
- 1983 – Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov averted a potential nuclear war by identifying as a false alarm signals that appeared to indicate an impending U.S. missile attack.
- Fujiwara no Teika (d. 1241)
- Edith Abbott (b. 1876)
- Henri Fertet (d. 1943)
September 27: Meskel (Orthodox Tewahedo)
- 1822 – In a letter to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in Paris, Jean-François Champollion announced his initial successes in deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone.
- 1875 – The Ellen Southard was wrecked in a storm at Liverpool, England; the U.S. Congress subsequently awarded 27 Gold Lifesaving Medals to the men who rescued her crew.
- 1916 – Lij Iyasu (pictured), the emperor-designate of Ethiopia, was deposed in favor of his aunt Zewditu.
- 1941 – SS Patrick Henry, the first of 2,710 Liberty ships built during World War II by the United States, was launched.
- 1983 – Software developer Richard Stallman announced plans for the Unix-like GNU operating system, the first free software developed by the GNU Project.
- Alphonsus Liguori (b. 1696)
- William Rulofson (b. 1826)
- Sylvia Pankhurst (d. 1960)
- 351 – The Eastern Roman armies under Constantius II defeated those of the usurper Magnentius at the Battle of Mursa Major.
- 1821 – The Declaration of Independence of the Mexican Empire from Spain was drafted in the National Palace in Mexico City.
- 1928 – Scottish biologist and pharmacologist Alexander Fleming (pictured) discovered penicillin when he noticed a bacteria-killing mould growing in his laboratory.
- 1978 – Pope John Paul I died only 33 days after his papal election due to an apparent myocardial infarction, resulting in the first year of three popes since 1605.
- François Turrettini (d. 1687)
- Jonathan Clarkson Gibbs (b. 1821)
- Sheikh Hasina (b. 1947)
September 29: Michaelmas (Western Christianity)
![New Scotland Yard, the Metropolitan Police headquarters](https://web.archive.org/web/20220808224603im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e3/New_Scotland_Yard_%C2%A6_Embankment_Chic_%3F_%2833219232590%29.jpg/162px-New_Scotland_Yard_%C2%A6_Embankment_Chic_%3F_%2833219232590%29.jpg)
- 1714 – During the Russian occupation of Finland, Cossacks killed about 800 inhabitants of the island of Hailuoto with axes.
- 1829 – The Metropolitan Police (headquarters pictured) of Greater London, originally headquartered in Great Scotland Yard, Westminster, was founded.
- 1941 – The Holocaust: Nazi forces, aided by Ukrainian collaborators, began a massacre of Jews in a ravine in Kyiv, killing more than 30,000 civilians in two days and thousands more in the following months.
- 1954 – Willie Mays of the New York Giants made The Catch, one of the most famous defensive plays in the history of Major League Baseball.
- 1991 – The award-winning Disney animated film Beauty and the Beast premiered as an unfinished film at the New York Film Festival.
- Arnaud Amalric (d. 1225)
- Elizabeth Gaskell (b. 1810)
- Bill Shankly (d. 1981)
September 30: Orange Shirt Day in Canada
- 1551 – Sue Takafusa, a retainer of the Ōuchi clan in western Japan, led a coup against the daimyō Ōuchi Yoshitaka, leading to the latter's forced suicide.
- 1882 – The Vulcan Street Plant in Appleton, Wisconsin, the first hydroelectric central station to serve a system of private and commercial customers in North America, went online.
- 1938 – Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Neville Chamberlain, and Édouard Daladier signed the Munich Agreement, stipulating that Czechoslovakia must cede the Sudetenland to Germany.
- 1975 – The Boeing AH-64 Apache (example pictured), the primary attack helicopter for a number of countries, made its first flight.
- 2019 – President Martín Vizcarra dissolved the Congress of Peru, resulting in a constitutional crisis.
- Charlotte Wolff (b. 1897)
- Catie Ball (b. 1951)
- Anwar al-Awlaki (d. 2011)
Selected anniversaries / On this day archive
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Selected anniversaries for October
October 1: Unification Day in Cameroon (1961); Independence Day in Nigeria (1960) and Tuvalu (1978); Filipino American History Month begins
- 1800 – With the signing of the Third Treaty of San Ildefonso, Spain returned the colonial territory of Louisiana to France in return for territories in the Italian region of Tuscany.
- 1868 – St Pancras railway station (pictured) in London, now the terminus of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, opened to the public.
- 1906 – A deputation of Muslim leaders led by the Aga Khan III met Indian viceroy Lord Minto to secure greater political representation, eventually leading to the founding of the All-India Muslim League.
- 1991 – Croatian War of Independence: Yugoslav People's Army forces invaded the area surrounding Dubrovnik, Croatia, beginning a seven-month siege of the city.
- Morphia of Melitene (d. 1126 or 1127)
- Helen Mayo (b. 1878)
- Faik Ali Ozansoy (d. 1950)
October 2: International Day of Non-Violence; Gandhi Jayanti in India
- 1263 – Scottish–Norwegian War: Norwegian and Scottish armies fought the Battle of Largs, an inconclusive engagement near the present-day town of Largs, Scotland.
- 1835 – Mexican dragoons dispatched to disarm settlers at Gonzales in Mexican Texas encountered stiff resistance from a Texian militia at the Battle of Gonzales, the first armed engagement of the Texas Revolution.
- 1937 – President Rafael Trujillo announced that Dominican troops had begun mass killings of Haitians living in the Dominican Republic.
- 1971 – Nguyễn Văn Thiệu (pictured) was re-elected unopposed as President of South Vietnam.
- 1996 – A maintenance worker's failure to remove tape covering the aircraft's static ports caused Aeroperú Flight 603 to crash into the ocean near Lima, Peru, killing all 70 people on board.
- François-Timoléon de Choisy (d. 1724)
- Ruth Cheney Streeter (b. 1895)
- Maria Ressa (b. 1963)
- 2333 BC – According to Korean legend, Dangun established Gojoseon, the first Korean kingdom.
- 1792 – Spanish forces departed Valdivia, Chile, to suppress the Huilliche uprising.
- 1951 – The First Battle of Maryang-san, widely regarded as one of the Australian Army's greatest accomplishments during the Korean War, began.
- 1981 – The hunger strike by Irish Republican Army prisoners at HM Prison Maze in Belfast ended after seven months and ten deaths (memorial pictured).
- 1991 – Nadine Gordimer became the first South African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
- Gabriel Lalemant (b. 1610)
- Carl Nielsen (d. 1931)
- Kathryn D. Sullivan (b. 1951)
October 4: Cinnamon Roll Day in Sweden and Finland
![Painting of the Battle of the Narrow Seas by Andries van Eertvelt](https://web.archive.org/web/20220808224603im_/https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/aa/Andries-van-Eertvelt-The-battle-in-the-strait-between-Calais-and-Dover-on-3-4-October-1602-between-the-Spanish-galleys-of-Federico-Spinola-and-Dutch-and-English-warships.jpg/174px-thumbnail.jpg)
- 1602 – Anglo-Spanish War: An English fleet intercepted and attacked six Spanish galleys in the Dover Straits (depicted).
- 1779 – American Revolution: James Wilson and his colleagues were forced to defend themselves after a mob, angered by his successful legal defense of 23 people from exile, converged on his house, resulting in six deaths.
- 1925 – Great Syrian Revolt: Rebels led by Fawzi al-Qawuqji captured the city of Hama from the French Mandate of Syria.
- 1941 – Willie Gillis, one of Norman Rockwell's trademark characters, debuted on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post.
- 1958 – The current Constitution of France was signed into law, establishing the French Fifth Republic.
- Henry Wriothesley, 2nd Earl of Southampton (d. 1581)
- Amaro Pargo (d. 1747)
- Henrietta Lacks (d. 1951)
- 1607 – Venetian statesman Paolo Sarpi survived an attack by assassins sent by Pope Paul V.
- 1869 – During construction of the Eastman tunnel in St. Anthony, Minnesota (now Minneapolis), the Mississippi River broke through the tunnel's limestone ceiling, nearly destroying Saint Anthony Falls.
- 1903 – Samuel Griffith (pictured) became the first Chief Justice of Australia, while Edmund Barton and Richard O'Connor became the first Puisne Justices of the High Court of Australia.
- 1973 – Seven nations signed the European Patent Convention, providing an autonomous legal system according to which European patents are granted.
- 2011 – Two Chinese cargo ships were attacked on a stretch of the Mekong River in the Golden Triangle area of Southeast Asia, and their crews murdered.
- Paul Fleming (b. 1609)
- Bill Willis (b. 1921)
- Eduardo Duhalde (b. 1941)
October 6: German-American Day in the United States
- 618 – Wang Shichong's army defeated that of Li Mi, allowing Wang to consolidate his power and soon depose China's Sui dynasty.
- 1762 – Seven Years' War: The Battle of Manila concluded with a British victory over Spain, leading to a twenty-month occupation.
- 1927 – The Jazz Singer (poster pictured), one of the first feature-length motion pictures with a synchronized recorded music score, was released.
- 1976 – Two bombs placed by the CIA-linked Cuban dissident group Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations exploded on Cubana Flight 455, killing all 73 aboard.
- 1985 – Police constable Keith Blakelock was killed during rioting in the Broadwater Farm housing estate in Tottenham, London.
- Samuel of Bulgaria (d. 1014)
- Francesco Manfredini (d. 1762)
- Sadiq al-Ahmar (b. 1956)
- 1513 – War of the League of Cambrai: A Venetian army under Bartolomeo d'Alviano was decisively defeated by the Spanish army commanded by Ramón de Cardona and Fernando d'Ávalos.
- 1849 – American writer Edgar Allan Poe (pictured) died under mysterious circumstances at Washington Medical College four days after being found on the streets of Baltimore, Maryland, in a delirious and incoherent state.
- 1944 – The Holocaust: Sonderkommando work-unit members in Auschwitz concentration camp revolted upon learning that they were due to be killed; although a few managed to escape, most were massacred on the same day.
- 1991 – Croatian War of Independence: The Yugoslav People's Army conducted an air strike on Banski dvori, the official residence of the president of Croatia in Zagreb.
- Pierre Le Muet (b. 1591)
- Uncle Dave Macon (b. 1870)
- Michelle Alexander (b. 1967)
- 1076 – Demetrius Zvonimir, the last native king who exerted any real power over the entire Croatian state, was crowned.
- 1871 – Five large fires broke out in the United States, including the Great Chicago Fire in Illinois and the Peshtigo fire in Wisconsin, the latter being the deadliest in U.S. history.
- 1904 – The Canadian city of Edmonton, Alberta (Downtown Edmonton pictured), was incorporated.
- 1952 – Three trains collided at Harrow & Wealdstone station in London, killing 112 people and injuring 340 others.
- 2019 – Anti-government protests calling for free and fair elections began in Baku, Azerbaijan.
- Pilgrim I (d. 923)
- John Hay (b. 1838)
- Varsha Bhosle (d. 2012)
October 9: Feast day of Saint John Henry Newman (Catholicism); Leif Erikson Day
- 1793 – French Revolution: After a month-long siege, the leaders of Lyon surrendered, ending their revolt against the National Convention.
- 1888 – The Washington Monument (pictured) in Washington, D.C., at the time the world's tallest building, officially opened to the general public.
- 1913 – Carrying a cargo hold full of highly flammable chemicals, the ocean liner SS Volturno caught fire in the north Atlantic and sank, resulting in 136 deaths.
- 1986 – The Phantom of the Opera, a musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and currently the longest-running Broadway show in history, opened in London's West End.
- 2019 – Syrian civil war: Turkish forces began an offensive into north-eastern Syria following the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the region.
- Claude Gaspar Bachet de Méziriac (b. 1581)
- Reginald Dyer (b. 1864)
- Clare Boothe Luce (d. 1987)
October 10: Sports Day in Japan (2022)
- 1760 – In a treaty with the Dutch colonial authorities, the Ndyuka people of Suriname gained territorial autonomy.
- 1846 – English astronomer William Lassell discovered Triton (pictured), the largest moon of Neptune.
- 1933 – In the first proven act of sabotage in the history of commercial aviation, a Boeing 247 operated by United Airlines exploded in mid-air near Chesterton, Indiana, killing all seven people aboard.
- 1943 – World War II: The Kenpeitai, the military police arm of the Imperial Japanese Army, arrested and tortured fifty-seven civilians and civilian internees on suspicion of their involvement in a raid on Singapore Harbour during Operation Jaywick.
- 1967 – The Outer Space Treaty, a treaty that forms the basis of international space law, entered into force.
- John Paston (b. 1421)
- Antoine Coysevox (d. 1720)
- Gavin Newsom (b. 1967)
October 11: Feast day of Saint James the Deacon (Anglicanism); National Coming Out Day; Thanksgiving in Canada (2021)
- 1311 – The peerage and clergy of the Kingdom of England published the Ordinances of 1311 to restrict King Edward II's powers.
- 1531 – Swiss Reformation leader Huldrych Zwingli was killed in battle when Zürich forces were attacked by Catholic cantons in response to a food blockade being applied by his alliance.
- 1840 – Bashir Shihab II (pictured) surrendered to the Ottoman Empire and was removed as Emir of Mount Lebanon after an imperial decree by Sultan Abdülmecid I.
- 1937 – Edward, Duke of Windsor, and Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, arrived at Friedrichstraße station in Berlin to begin their tour of Germany.
- 1991 – During the confirmation hearings upon the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court of the United States, Anita Hill testified that he had sexually harassed her several years earlier.
- Edward Colston (d. 1721)
- Henry J. Heinz (b. 1844)
- Beni Montresor (d. 2001)
October 12: National Day in Spain (1492)
- 1398 – The Grand Duke of Lithuania Vytautas the Great and the Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights Konrad von Jungingen signed the Treaty of Salynas, the third attempt to cede Samogitia to the Knights.
- 1799 – Jeanne Geneviève Garnerin (pictured) became the first woman to make a parachute descent, falling 900 m (3,000 ft) in a hot-air balloon gondola.
- 1871 – The Criminal Tribes Act entered into force in British India, giving law enforcement sweeping powers to arrest, control, and monitor the movements of the members of ethnic or social communities that were defined as "habitually criminal".
- 1984 – The Provisional Irish Republican Army detonated a bomb at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, England, in a failed attempt to assassinate British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet.
- Thomas Dudley (b. 1576)
- Arthur Harden (b. 1865)
- Sheila Florance (d. 1991)
- 1773 – French astronomer Charles Messier discovered the Whirlpool Galaxy (pictured), an interacting, grand design spiral galaxy located an estimated 31 million light-years away.
- 1843 – B'nai B'rith, the world's oldest continually operating Jewish service organization, was founded in New York City.
- 1921 – The Soviet republics of Russia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia signed the Treaty of Kars with the Grand National Assembly of Turkey, establishing the current borders between Turkey and the Caucasian states.
- 1961 – Newly elected Burundian prime minister Louis Rwagasore was assassinated by his political rivals.
- Rudolf Virchow (b. 1821)
- Lillie Langtry (b. 1853)
- Antonio Berni (d. 1981)
October 14: Defenders and Defendresses of Ukraine Day
- 1805 – War of the Third Coalition: French forces under Marshal Michel Ney defeated Austrian forces in Elchingen, present-day Germany.
- 1888 – French inventor Louis Le Prince filmed Roundhay Garden Scene (featured), the earliest surviving motion picture, in Leeds, England.
- 1926 – The first book featuring English author A. A. Milne's fictional bear Winnie-the-Pooh was published.
- 1943 – The Holocaust: Prisoners at Sobibor extermination camp revolted, killing 11 SS officers and staging a mass escape.
- 1964 – Members of the Politburo voted to remove Nikita Khrushchev as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and replace him with Leonid Brezhnev.
- Samuel Daniel (bur. 1619)
- Joseph Plateau (b. 1801)
- Sumner Welles (b. 1892)
October 15: Vijayadashami (Hinduism, 2021)
- 1864 – American Civil War: Confederate forces captured Glasgow, Missouri, although it had little long-term benefit as Price's Missouri Expedition was defeated a week later.
- 1888 – George Lusk, the chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee in London, received a letter allegedly from Jack the Ripper.
- 1917 – Dutch exotic dancer Mata Hari (pictured) was executed by a firing squad for spying for Germany.
- 1954 – Hurricane Hazel made landfall in the Carolinas in the United States before moving north to Toronto in Canada later the same day, killing a total of 176 people in both countries.
- 2011 – Global demonstrations against economic inequality, corporate influence on government, and other issues, were held in more than 950 cities in 82 countries.
- Lambert of Italy (d. 898)
- Louis-Eugène Cavaignac (b. 1802)
- Julia Yeomans (b. 1954)
- 1793 – Marie Antoinette, queen consort of Louis XVI, was guillotined at the Place de la Révolution in Paris at the height of the French Revolution.
- 1869 – Girton College (pictured), one of the 31 constituent colleges of the University of Cambridge and England's first residential college for women, was founded.
- 1923 – Roy and Walt Disney founded the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio in Hollywood; it eventually grew to become one of the largest media and entertainment corporations in the world.
- 1964 – With the success of Project 596, China became the world's fifth nuclear power.
- 1991 – A man drove his vehicle through the window of a Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, and opened fire, killing 23 people before fatally shooting himself.
- Shams al-Din Juvayni (d. 1284)
- John Hunter (d. 1793)
- Hema Malini (b. 1948)
October 17: Shemini Atzeret (Judaism, 2022)
- 1346 – Hundred Years' War: King David II of Scotland was captured at the Battle of Neville's Cross following his invasion of England under the terms of Scotland's Auld Alliance with France.
- 1660 – A series of executions of the commissioners who signed the death warrant of Charles I of England concluded; six were hanged, drawn and quartered for treason.
- 1931 – American gangster Al Capone (pictured) was convicted on five counts of income-tax evasion.
- 1952 – Indonesian Army elements surrounded the Merdeka Palace, demanding that President Sukarno disband the Provisional People's Representative Council.
- 2001 – Rehavam Ze'evi, the Israeli minister of tourism, was assassinated in revenge for the killing of PFLP leader Abu Ali Mustafa.
- Jupiter Hammon (b. 1711)
- Raffaele Bendandi (b. 1893)
- Micheline Ostermeyer (d. 2001)
October 18: Mawlid (Sunni Islam, 2021); Feast day of Saint Luke (Christianity); Alaska Day (1867)
- 1561 – Sengoku period: The Fourth Battle of Kawanakajima (depicted), one of the most famous in Japanese history, was fought in present-day Nagano Prefecture.
- 1748 – The War of the Austrian Succession ended with the signing of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle.
- 1929 – In the Persons Case, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council decided that women were eligible to sit in the Senate of Canada.
- 2019 – Protests in Santiago that started 11 days prior escalated into open battle against the Chilean national police, forcing President Sebastián Piñera to declare a state of emergency.
- John FitzWalter, 2nd Baron FitzWalter (d. 1361)
- Isaac Jogues (d. 1646)
- Jesse Helms (b. 1921)
- 1596 – The Spanish ship San Felipe was shipwrecked on the Japanese island of Shikoku, and its cargo confiscated by the local daimyō.
- 1752 – The Pennsylvania Gazette published a statement by Benjamin Franklin describing a kite experiment (depicted) to determine the electrical nature of lightning.
- 1943 – World War II: Allied aircraft sank the German cargo ship Sinfra, killing mostly Italian POWs.
- 1955 – At a meeting of its general assembly, the European Broadcasting Union approved the staging of the first Eurovision Song Contest.
- 1987 – The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by 22.6 percent on Black Monday, the largest one-day percentage decline in the stock market index's history.
- Salimuzzaman Siddiqui (b. 1897)
- Demetrios Christodoulou (b. 1951)
- Ali Treki (d. 2015)
- 1097 – Forces of the First Crusade arrived at Antioch, beginning an eight-month siege of the city.
- 1740 – Under the terms of the Pragmatic Sanction, Maria Theresa (pictured) ascended the Habsburg throne.
- 1951 – African-American college football player Johnny Bright was the victim of an on-field assault that eventually provoked changes in NCAA football rules that mandated the use of more protective helmets with face guards.
- 1991 – An earthquake struck the Indian state of Uttarakhand, killing at least 768 people and destroying thousands of homes.
- 2011 – First Libyan Civil War: Deposed leader Muammar Gaddafi was captured by rebel forces during the Battle of Sirte and killed shortly thereafter.
- Bálint Balassi (b. 1554)
- James Anthony Froude (d. 1894)
- Kamala Harris (b. 1964)
popularly used as can-can music
- 1096 – The Seljuk forces of Kilij Arslan destroyed the army of the People's Crusade as it marched toward Nicaea.
- 1858 – French composer Jacques Offenbach's operetta Orpheus in the Underworld, featuring the music most associated with the can-can (audio featured), was first performed at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens in Paris.
- 1941 – World War II: German soldiers massacred nearly 2,800 Serbs in Kragujevac in reprisal for insurgent attacks in the district of Gornji Milanovac.
- 1968 – At the height of the Japanese university protests, protestors occupied Shinjuku Station and clashed violently with police.
- 1994 – North Korea and the United States signed the Agreed Framework to limit the former's nuclear weapons program and to normalize relations between the two countries.
- Birger Jarl (d. 1266)
- Sims Reeves (b. 1821)
- Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)
October 22: International Stuttering Awareness Day; feast day of Saint John Paul II (Catholicism)
- 1633 – Ming Chinese naval forces defeated a Dutch East India Company fleet in the Taiwan Strait, the largest naval encounter between Chinese and European forces before the First Opium War more than two hundred years later.
- 1740 – A two-week massacre of ethnic Chinese in Batavia, Dutch East Indies, came to an end with at least 10,000 people killed.
- 1907 – A bank run forced New York's Knickerbocker Trust Company to suspend operations, which triggered the Panic of 1907.
- 1940 – After evading French and Spanish authorities, Belgian prime minister Hubert Pierlot (pictured) arrived in London, marking the beginning of the Belgian government in exile.
- 2001 – The controversial video game Grand Theft Auto III was first released to critical acclaim, and went on to popularise open-world and mature-content games.
- James Strachan-Davidson (b. 1843)
- George Coulthard (d. 1883)
- Deepak Chopra (b. 1946)
October 23: Mawlid (Shia Islam, 2021); Mole Day
- 1295 – The first treaty forming the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France against England was signed in Paris.
- 1850 – The inaugural National Women's Rights Convention, presided over by American activist Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis, began in Worcester, Massachusetts.
- 1906 – Alberto Santos-Dumont flew his biplane 14-bis (depicted) for 50 metres (160 ft) at a height of about four metres (13 ft).
- 1934 – Jeannette Piccard piloted a hot-air balloon flight that reached 57,579 feet (17,550 m), becoming the first woman to fly in the stratosphere.
- 1956 – The Hungarian Revolution began as a peaceful student demonstration that attracted thousands while marching through central Budapest to the parliament building.
- Johan Gabriel Ståhlberg (b. 1832)
- Emma Vyssotsky (b. 1894)
- Josh Kirby (d. 2001)
- 1648 – The second treaty of the Peace of Westphalia was signed, ending both the Thirty Years' War and the Dutch Revolt, and officially recognising the Dutch Republic and the Swiss Confederation as independent states.
- 1795 – As a result of the Third Partition of Poland, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth ceased to exist as an independent state, with its territory divided between Austria, Prussia, and Russia.
- 1889 – Sir Henry Parkes, Premier of the Colony of New South Wales, gave a speech in which he called for the federation of the six Australian colonies.
- 1931 – The George Washington Bridge (pictured), connecting New York City to Fort Lee, New Jersey, and today the world's busiest motor-vehicle bridge, was dedicated.
- 1964 – Charges in a military court against generals Dương Văn Đức and Lâm Văn Phát of leading a coup attempt against South Vietnamese leader Nguyễn Khánh, were dropped..
- Marianne North (b. 1830)
- Désiré Charnay (d. 1915)
- Carlo Abarth (d. 1979)
October 25: Labour Day in New Zealand (2021)
- 1147 – Reconquista: Forces under Afonso I of Portugal (pictured) captured Lisbon from the Moors after a four-month siege in one of the few Christian victories during the Second Crusade.
- 1854 – Crimean War: Lord Cardigan led his cavalry on a disastrous assault in the Battle of Balaclava.
- 1927 – The Italian cruise liner SS Principessa Mafalda sank when a propeller shaft broke and fractured the hull, resulting in 314 deaths.
- 1944 – Heinrich Himmler ordered a crackdown on the Edelweiss Pirates, a nonconformist youth group that assisted army deserters and others hiding from the Nazis.
- 2001 – Windows XP, one of the most popular and widely used versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system, was released for retail sale.
- Évariste Galois (b. 1811)
- Larry Itliong (b. 1913)
- Kara Hultgreen (d. 1994)
- 1341 – The Byzantine army proclaimed chief minister John VI Kantakouzenos emperor, triggering a civil war between his supporters and those of John V Palaiologos, the heir to the throne.
- 1902 – A group of Russian explorers led by Baron von Toll left their camp on Bennett Island and disappeared without a trace.
- 1921 – The Chicago Theatre (pictured), the oldest surviving grand movie palace, opened.
- 1955 – Ngô Đình Diệm proclaimed himself president of the newly created Republic of Vietnam after defeating former emperor Bảo Đại in a fraudulent referendum supervised by his brother Ngô Đình Nhu.
- 2001 – President George W. Bush signed the Patriot Act into law, significantly expanding the authority of law enforcement agencies in fighting terrorism in the United States and elsewhere.
- Sir John Gell, 1st Baronet (d. 1671)
- William T. Anderson (d. 1864)
- Elizabeth Cady Stanton (d. 1902)
- 1870 – Franco-Prussian War: The French Army of the Rhine under François Bazaine was forced to surrender after a nine-week siege of the fortifications of Metz.
- 1946 – Inter-religious riots in which Hindu mobs targeted Muslim families began in the Indian state of Bihar, resulting in anywhere between 2,000 and 30,000 deaths.
- 1981 – Cold War: The Soviet Whiskey-class submarine U137 ran aground near Sweden's Karlskrona naval base (monument pictured), sparking an international incident termed "Whiskey on the rocks".
- 2004 – The Boston Red Sox completed a sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals to win the 2004 World Series, breaking the so-called "Curse of the Bambino".
- 2011 – Michael D. Higgins was elected President of Ireland with far more votes than any politician in the country's history.
- Abulfeda (d. 1331)
- William Gillies (b. 1868)
- Jan Duursema (b. 1954)
October 28: Feast day of Saint Jude the Apostle (Western Christianity)
- 1776 – American Revolutionary War: As George Washington's Continental Army retreated northward from New York City, the British Army captured the village of White Plains.
- 1891 – The Mino–Owari earthquake, the strongest known inland earthquake in Japan's history, caused widespread damage and 7,273 deaths.
- 1928 – Indonesian composer Wage Rudolf Supratman introduced "Indonesia Raya", now the country's national anthem.
- 1971 – Prospero (flight spare pictured), the first British satellite launched on a British rocket, lifted off from Launch Area 5B at Woomera, South Australia.
- 2013 – The first terrorist attack in Beijing's recent history took place when members of the Turkistan Islamic Party drove a vehicle into a crowd, killing five people and injuring thirty-eight others.
- Robert Liston (b. 1794)
- Max Henry Ferrars (b. 1846)
- Rosalie Slaughter Morton (b. 1876)
October 29: Republic Day in Turkey (1923)
- 539 BC – Cyrus the Great captured Babylon, incorporating the Neo-Babylonian Empire and making the Achaemenid Empire the largest in history at that time.
- 1792 – William Robert Broughton, a member of George Vancouver's expedition, observed a peak in the present-day U.S. state of Oregon and named it Mount Hood (pictured) after British admiral Samuel Hood.
- 1948 – Arab–Israeli War: The Israel Defense Forces massacred at least 52 villagers while capturing the Palestinian Arab village of Safsaf.
- 1986 – British prime minister Margaret Thatcher officially opened the M25, one of Britain's busiest motorways.
- 1991 – Galileo became the first spacecraft to visit an asteroid when it made a flyby of 951 Gaspra.
- Dan Emmett (b. 1815)
- Franz von Papen (b. 1879)
- Woody Herman (d. 1987)
- 1863 – Seventeen-year-old Vilhelm, Prince of Denmark, arrived in Athens to become King George I of Greece (pictured).
- 1888 – King Lobengula of Matabeleland granted the Rudd Concession to agents of Cecil Rhodes, setting in motion the creation of the British South Africa Company.
- 1918 – The Armistice of Mudros was signed in Greece, ending hostilities in the Middle Eastern theatre of World War I and paving the way for the occupation of Constantinople and the subsequent partition of the Ottoman Empire.
- 1938 – CBS Radio broadcast the radio drama The War of the Worlds, causing panic among some listeners who believed that an actual Martian invasion was in progress.
- 1991 – The Madrid Conference, an attempt by the international community to revive the Israeli–Palestinian peace process through negotiations, convened.
- Adelaide Anne Procter (b. 1825)
- Günther von Kluge (b. 1882)
- Florence Nagle (d. 1988)
- 475 – Romulus Augustulus took the throne as the last effective ruling emperor of the Western Roman Empire.
- 1517 – According to one account, Martin Luther posted his Ninety-five Theses onto the door of All Saints' Church in Wittenberg, present-day Germany, marking the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.
- 1941 – Approximately 400 workers completed the 60-foot (18 m) busts of U.S. presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.
- 1984 – Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi (pictured) was assassinated by two of her own Sikh bodyguards, sparking riots that resulted in the deaths of thousands of Sikhs.
- 2015 – Shortly after takeoff, Metrojet Flight 9268 exploded and then crashed into the Sinai Peninsula, killing all 224 people on board.
- John Keats (b. 1795)
- Juliette Gordon Low (b. 1860)
- Larry Mullen Jr. (b. 1961)
Selected anniversaries / On this day archive
All · January · February · March · April · May · June · July · August · September · October · November · December
Recent changes · Editing guidelines
It is now 22:07 on Monday, August 8, 2022 (UTC) · Purge cache for this page
Selected anniversaries for November
November 1: Samhain and Beltane in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, respectively; Rajyotsava (Formation Day) in Karnataka, India (1956)
- 1503 – Giuliano della Rovere was elected pope, taking the name Julius II in emulation of Julius Caesar.
- 1611 – The first recorded performance of Shakespeare's play The Tempest was held at the Palace of Whitehall in London.
- 1921 - The first woman barrister in Ireland or Great Britain, Frances Kyle, was called to the Bar of Ireland.
- 1972 – Elvis on Tour, a concert film that documented Elvis Presley's tour throughout the United States opened.
- Antonio Canova (b. 1757)
- Jan Matejko (d. 1893)
- Anthony van Hoboken (d. 1983)
November 2: All Souls' Day (Western Christianity); first day of Diwali in India (2021)
- 619 – Emperor Gaozu allowed the assassination of a khagan of the Western Turkic Khaganate by Eastern Turkic rivals, one of the earliest events in the Tang campaigns against the Western Turks.
- 1917 – The British government issued the Balfour Declaration in support of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, then an Ottoman region with a small Jewish minority.
- 1963 – President Ngô Đình Diệm of South Vietnam was assassinated, marking the culmination of a coup d'état led by Dương Văn Minh.
- 1984 – The serial killer Velma Barfield became the first woman to be executed in the United States since 1962.
- 2007 – In Tbilisi, Georgia, tens of thousands of people demonstrated (police pictured) against the allegedly corrupt government of president Mikheil Saakashvili.
- Bettisia Gozzadini (d. 1261)
- Anne, Princess Royal and Princess of Orange (b. 1709)
- Harriet Bosse (d. 1961)
November 3: Kukur Tihar (Hinduism, 2021); Culture Day in Japan
- 1534 – The Parliament of England passed the first Act of Supremacy, making King Henry VIII head of the Church of England, supplanting the pope and the Catholic Church.
- 1793 – French Revolution: Playwright, journalist and outspoken feminist Olympe de Gouges (pictured) was guillotined.
- 1898 – The Fashoda Incident ended with French forces withdrawing after several months of military stalemate with the British in Fashoda (now in South Sudan).
- 1954 – The first film featuring the giant monster known as Godzilla was released nationwide in Japan.
- 1996 – Abdullah Çatlı, a leader of the ultra-nationalist Grey Wolves, was killed in a car crash near Susurluk, Turkey, sparking a scandal that exposed the depth of the state's complicity in organized crime.
- Petronilla de Meath (d. 1324)
- Bangalore Nagarathnamma (b. 1878)
- Ronald Barnes (d. 1997)
November 4: National Unity and Armed Forces Day in Italy (1918)
- 1780 – In the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru, Túpac Amaru II led a rebellion of Aymara, Quechua, and mestizo peasants in protest against the Bourbon Reforms.
- 1890 – London's City and South London Railway, the first deep-level underground railway in the world, officially opened, running a distance of 3.2 mi (5.1 km) between the City of London and Stockwell.
- 1922 – The tomb of Tutankhamun (pictured) was discovered by a team led by British Egyptologist Howard Carter.
- 1944 – Second World War: Allied forces completed Operation Pheasant, a major operation to clear German troops from the province of North Brabant in the Netherlands.
- 2016 – The Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change came into effect.
- Mary, Princess Royal and Princess of Orange (b. 1631)
- Dolly Stark (b. 1897)
- Tabu (b. 1971)
November 5: Guy Fawkes Night in Great Britain and some Commonwealth countries (1605)
- 1138 – Lý Anh Tông was enthroned as Emperor of Đại Việt at the age of two, beginning a 37-year reign.
- 1605 – The arrest of Guy Fawkes, found during a search of the Palace of Westminster, foiled the Gunpowder Plot, which planned to blow up the House of Lords.
- 1916 – An armed confrontation in Everett, Washington, between local authorities and members of the Industrial Workers of the World resulted in seven deaths.
- 1943 – World War II: An unknown aircraft dropped four bombs on Vatican City, which maintained neutrality during the war.
- 1990 – Ultra-Zionist rabbi Meir Kahane (pictured) was assassinated in a New York City hotel by an Arab gunman.
- Louis Bertrand Castel (b. 1688)
- Otto Wahle (b. 1879)
- Habibollah Asgaroladi (d. 2013)
November 6: Twin Holy Birthdays begin (Baháʼí Faith, 2021); Gustavus Adolphus Day in Estonia, Finland and Sweden (1632)
- 1217 – King Henry III of England issued the Charter of the Forest, re-establishing the rights of access for free men to royal forests.
- 1868 – Red Cloud (pictured), a leader of the Oglala Lakota Native American tribe, signed the second Treaty of Fort Laramie, ending Red Cloud's War and establishing the Great Sioux Reservation.
- 1939 – As part of their plan to eradicate the Polish intellectual elite, the Gestapo arrested 184 professors, students and employees of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków.
- 1977 – The Kelly Barnes Dam in Stephens County, Georgia, collapsed; the resulting flood killed 39 people and caused US$2.8 million in damages.
- 2016 – Syrian civil war: The Syrian Democratic Forces launched the Raqqa campaign, a successful military operation with the goal of isolating and eventually capturing the Islamic State's capital city, Raqqa.
- Charles II of Spain (b. 1661)
- John Philip Sousa (b. 1854)
- Anthony Sawoniuk (d. 2005)
- 680 – The Third Council of Constantinople convened to settle the Christological controversies of monoenergism and monothelitism.
- 1775 – Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of the Colony of Virginia, signed a proclamation promising freedom for the slaves of Patriots if they joined the British Armed Forces.
- 1941 – World War II: German aircraft sank the Soviet hospital ship Armenia while she was evacuating civilians and wounded soldiers from Crimea, killing an estimated 5,000 people.
- 1949 – Oil was discovered in the Caspian Sea off the coast of Azerbaijan, leading to the construction of Neft Daşları, the world's first offshore oil platform.
- 1991 – Professional basketball player Magic Johnson (pictured) announced his retirement from the game because of his infection with HIV.
- Emanuele Luigi Galizia (b. 1830)
- Lise Meitner (b. 1878)
- Eleanor Roosevelt (d. 1962)
November 8: Constitution Day in the Dominican Republic (2021)
- 1278 – Trần Thánh Tông, the second emperor of Vietnam's Trần dynasty, took up the title of retired emperor, but continued to co-rule with his son Nhân Tông for eleven more years.
- 1861 – American Civil War: USS San Jacinto stopped RMS Trent (depicted) and arrested two Confederate envoys en route to Europe, sparking a major diplomatic crisis between the United Kingdom and the United States.
- 1940 – The Italian invasion of Greece failed as outnumbered Greek units repulsed the Italians at the Battle of Elaia–Kalamas.
- 1971 – English rock group Led Zeppelin released their fourth album, which became one of the best-selling albums worldwide.
- 2016 – The Government of India announced the demonetisation of certain banknotes, causing prolonged cash shortages in the weeks that followed and significant disruption throughout the economy.
- Nyaungyan Min (b. 1555)
- Arnold Bax (b. 1883)
- Subroto Mukerjee (d. 1960)
- 1729 – Great Britain, France and Spain signed the Treaty of Seville to end the Anglo-Spanish War, despite the underlying tensions being left unresolved.
- 1888 – Mary Jane Kelly (pictured) was murdered in London; she is widely believed to be the fifth and final victim of the notorious unidentified serial killer Jack the Ripper.
- 1918 – The government of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic adopted a tricolour national flag that remains in use today with slight modifications by the present-day Republic of Azerbaijan.
- 1967 – The first issue of Rolling Stone, an American magazine focusing on music, politics and popular culture, was published.
- 2019 – Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan inaugurated the Kartarpur Corridor, a visa-free border crossing connecting the Gurdwara Darbar Sahib to the Indian border.
- Johannes Narssius (b. 1580)
- Nadezhda Alliluyeva (d. 1932)
- Markus Wolf (d. 2006)
November 10: Noor Hossain Day in Bangladesh (1987)
- 1202 – Fourth Crusade: The Siege of Zara (present-day Zadar, Croatia), the first attack on a Catholic city by Catholic crusaders, began.
- 1865 – Henry Wirz, the Confederate superintendent of Andersonville Prison, was hanged after a controversial conviction, becoming the only American Civil War soldier executed for war crimes.
- 1937 – Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas (pictured) led a coup against his own constitutional government, establishing the dictatorial Estado Novo regime.
- 1969 – The children's television series Sesame Street premiered in the United States.
- 2009 – Ships of the South Korean and North Korean navies skirmished off Daecheong Island in the Yellow Sea.
- Isabel de Forz, 8th Countess of Devon (d. 1293)
- Elisa Leonida Zamfirescu (b. 1887)
- Ken Kesey (d. 2001)
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