1697 – Czar Peter the Great begins tour through West-Europe
1788 – Fire destroys 856 buildings in New Orleans Louisiana
1826 – Beethoven’s Quartet #13 in B flat major (Op 130) premiered in Vienna
1857 – Earthquake hits Tokyo; about 107,000 die
1871 – Journalist Henry M Stanley begins his famous expedition to Africa
1907 – US invades Honduras
1924 – Mass Investors Trust becomes 1st mutual fund set up in US
1935 – Persia officially renamed Iran
1943 – Assassination attempt on Hitler fails
1947 – President Harry Truman signs Executive Order 9835 requiring all federal employees to have allegiance to the United States
1951 – Julius and Ethel Rosenberg convicted of espionage
1962 – A bear becomes the first creature to be ejected at supersonic speeds Bears were used to test the survivability of ejection solutions at high speed. According to various reports, some survived and some didn’t.
1965 – US Ranger 9 launched; takes 5,814 pictures before lunar impact
1975 – Ethiopia ends monarchy after 3000 years
1979 – Egyptian Parliament approves peace treaty with Israel
2012 – Five former Guatemalan paramilitaries are sentenced to 7,710 years in jail for their role in the Plan de Sanchez massacre in 1982
2013 – The European Space Agency reveals new data that indicates that the universe is 13.82 billion years old
Birthdays
1869 – Albert Kahn, architect, originated modern factory design
1880 – Hans Hofmann, German/US painter (Search for the Real)
1904 – Forrest Mars Sr., American candymaker (d. 1999)
1906 – John D Rockefeller III, billionaire philanthropist (oil)
Anniversaries
1891 – A Hatfield marries a McCoy, ends long feud in West Virginia it started with an accusation of pig-stealing that lasted 20 years
Deaths
1556 – Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, burned at stake at 66
1617 – Pocahontas, Native American, daughter of Powhatan (b. 1595)
1991 – Leo Fender, inventor (Fender guitar), dies
2013 – Chinua Achebe, Nigerian poet and novelist, dies at 82
