Roman Empire
361 Roman Emperor Constantius II dies at Mopsucrene on route to put down his general and cousin Julian, whose troops had proclaimed him Augustus
Historic Discovery
1493 Christopher Columbus 'discovers' the island of Dominica, which was originally inhabited by the Kalinago
Historic Event
1534 English parliament passes the Act of Supremacy making Henry VIII and all subsequent monarchs the Head of the Church of England
Treaty of Interest
1579 Francis Drake arrives at Ternate in the East Indies and makes a trade treaty with the Sultan of Ternate, buys a cargo of cloves [1]
- 1620 Great Patent granted to Plymouth Colony
Historic Event
1629 Prince Frederick Henry festival in The Hague
Treaty of Interest
1716 Pacification Treaty of Warsaw: Tsar Peter the Great guarantees Saxon monarch August I's Polish kingdom
Historic Event
1783 George Washington orders Continental Army disbanded
- 1783 John Austin, a footpad turned murderer, is the last to be publicly hanged at London's Tyburn gallows
- 1791 Battle at Wabash: Indians assault general St Clair, 637 soldiers killed
Historic Event
1793 French playwright, journalist and feminist Olympe de Gouges is guillotined
- 1794 French troops conquer Maastricht
Election of Interest
1796 John Adams elected as 2nd president of the United States of America
Victory in Battle
1812 Napoleonic armies defeated at Vyazma
- 1813 US troops under General Coffee annihilate the Red Stick Creek Indian village at Tallasseehatchee, Alabama
- 1820 Cuenca (Santa Ana de los Ríos de Cuenca), Ecuador, declares independence
- 1838 The Times of India, world's largest circulated English language daily broadsheet newspaper founded as The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce
- 1839 First Opium War - 2 British frigates engage several Chinese junks
- 1839 Palace of Gulhane Turkey, freedom of religion proclaimed
- 1848 Johan Thorbeckes revises the Constitution of the Netherlands
- 1856 A British fleet bombards Canton
Historic Event
1860 Poet and critic Matthew Arnold begins his series of lectures "On Translating Home" as Oxford Professor of Poetry at Oxford University
Historic Event
1867 Battle at Mentana: French & Papal troops beat Giuseppe Garibaldi
- 1868 John Willis Menard from Louisiana is elected the first black US Congressman (opposition to his election means he never sits in Congress)
Election of Interest
1868 Ulysses S. Grant (R) wins US presidential election over Horatio Seymour (D)
- 1869 Canada's Hamilton Football Club forms
- 1874 James Theodore Holly, elected bishop of Haiti
- 1883 American Old West: Self-described "Black Bart the poet" gets away with his last stagecoach robbery, but leaves an incriminating clue that eventually leads to his capture
- 1883 Race riots kill 4 blacks in Danville Virginia
- 1883 US Supreme Court decides federal courts have no jurisdiction over Native American tribal Council (Ex parte Crow Dog)
- 1885 Tacoma vigilantes drive out Chinese, burn their homes & businesses
- 1886 Friars of Tilburg arrives on Curacao
- 1889 Chaplain Ariëns founds first Roman Catholic Workers group
Royal Coronation
1889 Menelik II is crowned Emperor of Ethiopia at the Church of Mary on Mount Entoto
- 1896 J H Hunter patents portable weighing scales
- 1896 Martha Hughes Cannon of Utah elected 1st female state senator in the US
Election of Interest
1896 William McKinley (R) defeats William Jennings Bryan (D) to be President of the United States
Historic Event
1905 Tsar Nicholas II of Russia signs a document of amnesty for the political prisoners
- 1906 International Radiotelegraph Conference in Berlin selects "SOS" (· · · – – – · · ·) distress signal as the worldwide standard for help
Election of Interest
1908 William Howard Taft (R) elected 27th U.S. President over William Jennings Bryan (D)
- 1914 1st modern elastic brassiere is patented by New York socialite Mary Phelps Jacob
- 1916 Treaty establishes British suzerainty over Qatar
- 1917 1st class US mail now costs 3 cents per ounce
- 1918 Austro-Hungarian Empire dissolves
- 1918 Poland proclaims independence from Russia after WW I
- 1918 Thousands of revolutionary German sailors with the fleet at Kiel mutiny, seize the city, and set up councils of workers and sailors
- 1922 Greek parliament bans Prince Andreas for life
- 1927 22.3 cm rainfall at Somerset, Vermont (state record)
- 1927 Tropical storm flooding kills 84 in Winooski River Valley, Vermont
- 1928 Turkey switches from Arabic to Roman alphabet
Historic Event
1930 Bank of Italy renamed Bank of America
- 1930 First vehicular tunnel to a foreign country (Detroit-Windsor) opens
Coup d'état
1930 Getúlio Dornelles Vargas became Head of the Provisional Government in Brazil after a bloodless coup on October 24.
Election of Interest
1936 President Franklin D. Roosevelt wins a second term in office, defeating Republican candidate Alf Landon in the most lopsided election in American history in terms of electoral vote
- 1939 Clare Booth's "Margin for Error" premieres in NYC
Attack on Pearl Harbor
1941 Hirohito's accord on Yamamoto's attack plan on Pearl Harbor fails
- 1942 12th day of battle at El Alamein: Scottish assault
- 1942 William L Dawson elected to Congress from Chicago
- 1943 P-47D Thunderbolt shot down above North Holland
- 1944 Allied commandos land at Westkapelle, on the Dutch island of Walcheren
- 1944 German troops in Vlissingen surrender
- 1944 Pro-German government of Hungary flees
- 1944 US 28th Infantry division occupies Schmidt Hurtgenwald
Historic Event
1952 Clarence Birdseye markets frozen peas
- 1952 Egypt protests German retribution payments to Israel
- 1954 Nobel for physics awarded to Max Born & Walter Bothe
Historic Event
1955 Argentine ex-president Juan Perón arrives in Nicaragua
- 1955 Australia takes control of Cocos Islands
- 1955 Bernardus J Alfrink installed as archbishop of Utrecht
- 1955 First virus crystallized (announced)
- 1956 Suez Crisis: After several days of fighting, Israeli forces capture the Gaza Strip
Space Dog Laika Launched to her Death
1957 Soviet Union launches Sputnik 2 with space dog Laika aboard, a mostly-Siberian husky, the 1st animal in space
- 1958 USSR performs nuclear test
Election of Interest
1959 David Ben-Gurion's Mapai party wins Israeli parliamentary election
- 1960 Ivory Coast adopts constitution
Election of Interest
1961 UN General Assembly unanimously elects U Thant as acting Secretary-General after the death of Dag Hammarskjöld in a plane crash
Election of Interest
1964 Lyndon B. Johnson is elected President of the United States in a landslide, with Hubert Humphrey as his vice president, defeating Republican candidate Barry Goldwater
- 1967 Vietnam War: The Battle of Dak To begins, becoming one of the bloodiest battles of the war
Election of Interest
1968 Bob Packwood is elected senator of Oregon
- 1968 Ex-Prime Minister of Greece Georgios Papandreou buried. 300,000 demonstrate against fascist junta
- 1969 Congo president Mobutu visits Belgium
Historic Event
1970 Marxist Salvador Allende inaugurated as President of Chile
Historic Event
1970 US President Richard Nixon promises gradual troop removal of Vietnam
- 1971 "Play Misty For Me" premieres
- 1973 Atlantic Records releases "Abandoned Luncheonette", the second studio album by the American pop rock duo Daryl Hall & John Oates
- 1973 Mariner 10 launched-1st Venus pics, 1st mission to Mercury
- 1975 U.S. advice columnist for "Good Housekeeping" Ann Landers asks parents in a mail-in survey "‘If you had it to do over again, would you have children?" 70% of participants say no
- 1978 Dominica gains independence from UK & adopts constitution
- 1978 USSR & Vietnam sign peace & friendship treaty
- 1979 Five people mortally wounded during anti-Ku Klux Klan demonstration in NC
- 1979 Moroccan offensive against Polisario Front
- 1980 Ianford Wilson's "5th of July" premieres in NYC
- 1983 Jesse Jackson launches his 1st campaign for presidency (D)
- 1984 3,000 die in 3 day anti-Sikh riot in India
Assassination
1984 Body of assassinated Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi cremated
- 1985 President Alfonsín's Radical Burgerunie wins in Argentine legislative elections
- 1986 Federated States of Micronesia signs Compact of Free Association with US
- 1986 Joaquim Chissano elected president Mozambique
- 1986 Lebanese magazine Ash Shirra reveals secret US arms sales to Iran
- 1986 Northern Mariana Islands becomes a Commonwealth associated with US
Historic Invention
1987 Gordon Gould issued US patent US4704583 for the laser, ending his 30-year battle to be credited as the inventor of the laser
- 1987 On Wall Street, after 5 consecutive gains, Dow Jones down 50.56
- 1988 Pakistan claims it downed Afghan warplane
Historic Event
1988 President Reagan signs credit-card disclosure-bill
- 1988 Soviet Union agrees to allow teaching of Hebrew
- 1989 100s of Bulgarian demonstrate in Sofia for democratic rights
- 1990 Gro Harlem Brundtland is installed as Prime Minister of Norway
- 1990 MLB club owners agree to pay players $280 million in damages under a settlement to close aftermath of the owners' 3-year conspiracy case against free agents; largest owner-to-player payment ever made in sports
- 1992 Carol Moseley-Braun elected first African-American woman in US Senate, representing Illinois
Election of Interest
1992 Democrat Bill Clinton is elected President of the United States, defeating incumbent President George H. W. Bush
- 1994 Dutch & British astronomers find spiral nebula Dwingeloo 1
- 1994 Space shuttle STS-66 (Atlantis 13), launches
- 1994 Susan Smith who claimed her two children were carjacked arrested for murder
- 1994 Total solar eclipse in South America (4m23s)
- 1997 California law ends affirmative action
- 2004 With no sign the lockout of its players will end in the near future, the National Hockey League cancels 2005 All-Star Game scheduled for February in Atlanta
Historic Event
2007 Pervez Musharraf declares emergency rule across Pakistan, suspends the Constitution, imposes a State of Emergency and fires the chief justice of the Supreme Court
9/11 Attack on NY's World Trade Towers
2014 New York's 104-storey One World Trade Center officially opens 13 years after the September 11 attacks
Historic Event
2014 UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon calls for global action on climate change after warning from scientists
- 2015 Game Maker Activision Blizzard (Call of Duty) buys King.com (Candy Crush) for $5.9 billion
- 2017 Pakistani woman charged with poisoning 17 members of husband's family in attempt to escape forced marriage in Punjab Province
- 2018 Truck loses control hitting 31 cars and killing at least 15 people near a tollbooth in Lanzhou, China
- 2019 Delhi reaches worst pollution levels of the year, over 900 AQI, with authorities declaring public health emergency
- 2019 Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil producer Saudi Aramco, the world's most profitable company, announces its plans to go public
- 2020 Australia's Melbourne Cup won by Twilight Payment
- 2020 Hurricane Eta makes landfall in Nicaragua as a Category Four storm with winds of 140 km, killing at least 235 people across Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico and Panama
- 2021 4-year old Cleo Smith found 18 days after she disappeared from a family tent, by police in Carnarvon, Western Australia
- 2021 South African writer Damon Galgut wins literature's Booker Prize for his novel "The Promise"
- 2021 US begins vaccinating children aged 5 to 11 years with a lower dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine
- 2022 A Swiss gruyère by Vorderfultigen and Gourmino wins best cheese at the World Cheese Awards in Newport, Wales [1]
- 2022 Oregon approves drug-policy reform ballot legalizing psilocybin (magic) mushrooms for use in therapy, along with decriminalizes possession of small amounts of drugs [1]