Today in History

Today in History

660 BC Traditional founding of Japan by Emperor Jimmu Tenno.

1531 Henry VIII is recognized as the supreme head of the Church of England.

1805 Sixteen-year-old Sacajawea, the Shoshoni guide for Lewis & Clark, gives birth to a son, with Meriwether Lewis serving as midwife.

1809 Robert Fulton patents the steamboat.

1815 News of the Treaty of Ghent, ending the War of

1812, finally reaches the United States.

1858 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous, a French miller’s daughter, claims to have seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes.

1903 Congress passes the Expedition Act, giving antitrust cases priority in the courts.

1904 President Theodore Roosevelt proclaims strict neutrality for the United States in the Russo-Japanese War.

1910 Theodore Roosevelt Jr. and Eleanor Alexander announce their wedding date–June 20, 1910.

1926 The Mexican government nationalizes all church property.

1936 The Reich arrests 150 Catholic youth leaders in Berlin.

1939 The Negrin government returns to Madrid, Spain.

1942 The German battleships Gneisenau, Scharnhorst and Prinz Eugen begin their famed channel dash from the French port of Brest. Their journey takes them through the English Channel on their way back to Germany.

1945 The meeting of President Franklin Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Marshal Joseph Stalin in Yalta, adjourns.

1951 U.N. forces push north across the 38th parallel for the second time in the Korean War.

1953 Walt Disney’s film Peter Pan premieres.

1954 A 75,000-watt light bulb is lit at the Rockefeller Center in New York, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Thomas Edison’s first light bulb.

1955 Nationalist Chinese complete the evacuation of the Tachen Islands.

1959 Iran turns down Soviet aid in favor of a U.S. proposal for aid.

1962 Poet and novelist Sylvia Plath commits suicide in London at age 30.

1964 Cambodian Prince Sihanouk blames the United States for a South Vietnamese air raid on a village in his country.

1965 President Lyndon Johnson orders air strikes against targets in North Vietnam, in retaliation for guerrilla attacks on the American military in South Vietnam.

1966 Vice President Hubert Humphrey begins a tour of Vietnam.

1974 Communist-led rebels shower artillery fire into a crowded area of Phnom Pehn, killing 139 and injuring 46 others.

1975 Mrs. Margaret Thatcher becomes the first woman to lead the British Conservative Party.

1990 South African political leader Nelson Mandela is released from prison in Paarl, South Africa, after serving more than 27 years of a life sentence.

Born

1535 Gregory XIV, Roman Catholic Pope.

1800 William Henry Fox Talbot, photography pioneer; he produced the first book with photographic illustrations (The Pencil of Nature).

1833 Melville Weston Fuller, eighth U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice.

1847 Thomas Alva Edison, prolific American inventor; he jointly or singly held over 1,300 patents.

1855 Josephine Marshall Jewell Dodge, American educator; she was a pioneer in the concept of day nurseries for children.

1898 Leo Szilard, physicist, instrumental in the Manhattan Project.

History