- 356 BC Herostratus sets fire to the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the World
- 230 St Pontianus begins his reign as Catholic Pope
Event of Interest
285 Diocletian appoints Maximian as Caesar and co-ruler
Diocletian
Victory in Battle
1403 Battle of Shrewsbury: Army led by the Lancastrian King of England, Henry IV defeats a rebel army led by Henry "Harry Hotspur" Percy of Northumberland thus ending the Percy challenge to the throne. Also the first battle English archers fought each other on English soil.
Henry IV of England
- 1542 Pope Paul III begins inquisition against Protestants (Sactum Officium)
- 1545 The first landing of French troops onto the coast of the Isle of Wight during the French invasion
- 1568 Battle at Jemmingen: Alva's troops beat Dutch rebellion
- 1579 Mechelen surrenders to Duke of Parma
- 1588 First engagement between the English fleet and the Spanish Armada off the Eddystone Rocks
- 1595 Spanish explorer Álvaro de Mendaña is the first European to discover the Marquesas Island in Eastern Polynesia
Event of Interest
1669 John Locke's Constitution of English colony Carolina is approved
John Locke
- 1718 The Treaty of Passarowitz between the Ottoman Empire, Austria and the Republic of Venice is signed
- 1730 States of Holland put death penalty on "sodomy"
- 1749 Pieter Steyn becomes pension advisor of Holland
- 1773 Pope Clemens XIV bans Jesuits
- 1774 Russo-Turkish War, 1768-74: Russia and the Ottoman Empire sign Treaty of Kuchuk-Kainarji ending the war
Victory in Battle
1798 Napoleon Bonaparte wins Battle of Pyramids in Egypt (Battle of Embabeh) against Mamluk rulers, wiping out most of the Egyptian army
Napoléon Bonaparte
Event of Interest
1853 Central Park in New York created when New York State Legislature puts aside more than 750 acres of land on Manhattan Island
Frederick Law Olmsted
- 1861 First Battle of Bull Run [Battle of First Manassas], 1st major battle of the US Civil War is fought near Manassas, Virginia, Confederate victory
Event of Interest
1865 In market square of Springfield, Missouri, Wild Bill Hickok shoots and kills Davis Tutt in what is regarded as the first true western showdown
Wild Bill Hickok
Event of Interest
1873 Jesse James and James Younger gang's 1st train robbery at Adair, Iowa
Jesse James
- 1877 -27] US army breaks railroad strike
- 1880 Compressed air accident kills 20 workers on Hudson River tunnel, NY
- 1896 National Federation of Colored Women established in Washington, D.C.
- 1897 Tate Gallery opens in England
- 1900 Pope Leo XIII encyclical to Greek-Melkite rite
- 1904 After 13 years, the 4,607-mile Trans-Siberian railway is completed
- 1904 Camille Jenatzy sets world auto speed record at 65.79 MPH
- 1913 The Egyptian government announces a new constitutional system and electoral law
Event of Interest
1915 Woodrow Wilson sends the third Lusitania note, warning Germany that future infringement of American rights will be deemed 'deliberately unfriendly'
Woodrow Wilson
- 1917 Russian Revolution: Socialist Alexander Kerensky becomes Russian Prime Minister
- 1918 U-156 shells Nauset Beach, in Orleans, Massachusetts
- 1919 Anthony Fokker's establishes airplane factory at Hamburg and Amsterdam
- 1919 Dirigible crashes through bank skylight killing 13 in Chicago, Illinois
- 1920 Irish Nationalist and Loyalists engage in street fighting over the issue of Irish independence from Britain, though Loyalist are reinforced by 1500 British Auxiliaries and 5800 British troops
- 1921 To prove his contention that air power is superior to sea power, US Colonel William Mitchell demonstrates how bombs from planes can sink a captured German battleship
Event of Interest
1925 John T. Scopes found guilty of teaching evolution in the “Scopes monkey trial” in Dayton, Tennessee, fined $100 and costs
John T. Scopes
- 1930 110°F (43°C) at Millsboro, Delaware (state record)
- 1930 US Veterans Administration forms
- 1931 Reno race track, becomes 1st in US to use daily double wagering
- 1933 Haifa Harbor in Palestine opens
- 1934 113°F (45°C), near Gallipolis, Ohio (state record)
- 1938 Paul Hindemith and Leonide Massine's ballet Nobilissima Visione premieres in London
- 1940 Soviet Union annexes Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania
- 1940 VARA-management accepts Rost of Tonningens demands
- 1941 200 Jewish Torahs are burned in Ukraine
Heinrich Himmler
- 1942 8 die as coal waste heap slides in river valley near Oakwood, Virginia
Meeting of Interest
1944 British premier Winston Churchill flies to France, meets Montgomery
Winston Churchill
Event of Interest
1944 Field Marshal Günther von Kluge warns Hitler of impending collapse of front in Normandy
Adolf Hitler
Event of Interest
1951 Dalai Lama returns to Tibet
Tenzin Gyatso
- 1952 7.8 earthquake shakes Kern County California, 14 killed
- 1952 Premier Ghavam es-Sultaneh of Persia, resigns
- 1954 At Geneva, France agrees to independence of North & South Vietnam
- 1955 USS Seawolf launched, 1st submarine powered by liquid metal cooled nuclear reactor
- 1956 US performs atmospheric nuclear Test at Enwetak
- 1959 1st nuclear powered merchant ship, NS Savannah, named, Camden NJ
- 1960 Country of Katanga forms in Africa
Election of Interest
1960 Sirimavo Bandaranaike becomes the world's 1st female head of state elected in modern times, as Prime Minister of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka)
Sirimavo Bandaranaike
- 1960 Francis Chichester arrive in NY aboard Gypsy Moth II, setting record of 40 days for a solo Atlantic crossing
- 1961 Launch of Mercury 4 (Liberty Bell) with Grissom
- 1962 160 civil right activists jailed after demonstration in Albany, Georgia
- 1962 Battles on Chinese & Indies boundary
- 1964 Arnold Long takes 11 catches in the match for Surrey v Sussex
- 1964 Last Dutch whaling ship Willem Barents Sea sold to Japan
- 1964 Race riots in Singapore between Chinese and Malay groups, 23 killed, 454 injured
- 1965 Pakistan, Iran and Turkey sign Regional Co-Operation pact
- 1966 Gemini X returns to Earth
- 1966 USSR performs nuclear Test at Eastern Kazakh/Semipalitinsk USSR
Apollo 11 Bootprint
1969 Apollo 11: Neil Armstrong becomes the first person to step on the Moon at 2:56:15 AM (GMT)
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- 1969 Russia's Luna 15 impacts moon after 52 lunar orbits
- 1970 Aswan High Dam opens in Egypt, enables human control of the flooding of the Nile
- 1970 Libya orders confiscation of all Jewish property
- 1970 USSR performs nuclear Test at Eastern Kazakh/Semipalitinsk USSR
- 1971 US performs nuclear test at Nevada Test Site
Event of Interest
1971 Sam Giancana returns to the United States after spending seven years of exile in Mexico
Sam Giancana
- 1972 2 passenger trains collide head-on killing 76 (Seville, Spain)
- 1972 27.5 cm rainfall at Fort Ripley, Minnesota (state record)
- 1972 In New York 57 murders occur in 24 hours
- 1972 Bloody Friday: within the space of seventy-five minutes, the Provisional Irish Republican Army explode twenty-two bombs in Belfast; six civilians, two British Army soldiers and one UDA volunteer were killed, 130 injured
- 1973 France performs nuclear Test at Mururoa Atoll in the Pacific
- 1973 USSR launches Mars 4 for fly-by (2600 km) of red planet
Event of Interest
1974 US House Judiciary approves two Articles of Impeachment against President Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon
- 1976 1st outbreak of "Legionnaire's Disease" kills 29 in Philadelphia
- 1976 Christopher Ewart-Biggs, British Ambassador to the Republic of Ireland, and his secretary Judith Cook are assassinated by a bomb planted by the Provisional IRA in his car in Dublin
- 1977 Libyan-Egyptian border fights
- 1977 Sri Lankan Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike loses general election
- 1977 Sanjiva Reddy is elected sixth President of India unopposed
- 1978 Bolivian military coup under General Juan Pereda, President Hugo Banzer flees
- 1978 US Postal Service & unions agree on a contract averting mail strike
- 1978 World's strongest dog, 80-kg St Bernard, pulls 2909-kg load 27 m
- 1979 National Women's Hall of Fame (Seneca Falls, NY) dedicated
- 1980 Jean-Claude Droyer climbs Eiffel Tower in 2 hrs 18 mins
- 1981 Australia set 130 to win, all out 111 at Headingley Willis 8-43
- 1982 France performs nuclear Test at Mururoa atoll
- 1983 Polish government ends 19 months of martial law
- 1983 US announces Lebanon freed American hostage David Dodge
- 1983 World's lowest-ever natural temperature recorded −89.2 °C (−128.6 °F; 184.0 K) at Soviet Vostok Station, Antarctica
- 1984 Marita Koch of East Germany sets world women's mark for 200m, 21.71s
- 1984 USSR performs underground nuclear Test
- 1985 Amina Fakir (Detroit), 23, crowned 18th Miss Black America
- 1986 Pleasure Island plans unveiled
- 1988 ESA's Ariane-3 launches 2 communications satellites (1 Indian)
- 1988 Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis accepts Democratic nomination for president
- 1989 Eastern Airlines submits a reorganization plan to creditors
- 1990 Goodwill Games opens in Seattle, Washington
- 1991 Sharmell Sullivan (Gary Indiana), 20, crowned 23rd Miss Black America
- 1991 Ferguson Jenkins, Gaylord Perry, Rod Carew, Tony Lazzeri, & Bill Veeck are elected into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY
Election of Interest
1994 Tony Blair is declared the winner of the leadership election of the British Labour Party, paving the way for him to become Prime Minister in 1997
Tony Blair
- 1995 Brian Lara completes a pair for West Indians v Kent
- 1997 The fully restored USS Constitution (aka "Old Ironsides") celebrates her 200th birthday, setting sail for the first time in 116 years
- 2002 Telecom giant WorldCom files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, the then largest such filing in United States history
- 2004 The United Kingdom government publishes Delivering Security in a Changing World, a paper detailing wide-ranging reform of the country's armed forces
- 2005 Four terrorist bombers target London's public transportation system, exactly two weeks after the July 7 bombings. All four bombs fail to detonate leading to the capture of all the bombers.
Historic Publication
2007 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final book in the series by J. K. Rowling is published worldwide. 11 million copies sell in 24 hrs
J. K. Rowling
- 2008 Bosnian-Serb war criminal Radovan Karadžić is arrested in Serbia and is indicted by the UN's ICTY tribunal
- 2011 NASA's Space Shuttle program ends with the landing of Space Shuttle Atlantis on mission STS-135
- 2013 15 Egyptian Army soldiers are killed after their bus crashes into a truck on the Mediterranean Coast Highway
- 2013 12 people are killed in a clash between two Muslim families in Lanao del Sur, Philippines
Event of Interest
2013 Philippe of Belgium becomes King of the Belgiums after his father King Albert II's earlier abdication
Philippe of Belgium
- 2014 After 3 weeks, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has struck about 2,800 targets in Gaza, while Gaza has fired 1,497 rockets at Israel
- 2015 On This Day changes its domain name and brand from HistoryOrb.com to OnThisDay.com
- 2017 White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer resigns after opposing appointment of Anthony Scaramucci
- 2018 India scraps tax on sanitary products after campaign by activists
- 2019 Puerto Rico's governor Ricardo Rosselló says he won't seek re-election after widespread protests over misogynistic and homophobic comments in his leaked online chats
- 2019 British Open Men's Golf, Royal Portrush GC: Playing in torrential rain, Irishman Shane Lowry wins his first major title by 6 strokes from Tommy Fleetwood of England