1631 – Mount Vesuvious erupts, destroys six villages and takes four-thousand lives
1707 – Last recorded eruption of Mount Fuji in Japan
1773 – The Boston Tea Party is hosted by the Sons of Liberty to protest the newest form of taxation without representation, the Tea Act. After the rebellion, the British Parliament passed the Coercive acts with the intent of punishing the Patriots, who referred to them as the Intolerable Acts, which were pivotal in the development of the outbreak of the American Revolution
1897 – A demonstration of the first submarine with an internal combustion engine is held
1900 – Boer army under General Kritzinger take Cape colony
1903 – Majestic Theater, in New York City, becomes the first in the United States to employ women ushers
1915 – Albert Einstein publishes his “General Theory of Relativity”, which provides a unified description of gravity as a geometric property of space and time.
1998 – In what is referred to as Operation Desert Fox, the United States and United Kingdom bomb targets in Iraq
Birthdays
1770 – Ludwig van Beethoven, Bonn, Germany, composer
1775 – Jane Austen, Winchester, Hampshire, novelist remembered for Pride and Prejudice
Deaths
1859 – Wilhelm Grimm, dies at seventy-three. Wilhelm was the younger of the Brothers Grimm. Jacob and Wilhelm were very close; they always lived under the same roof and shared books and property. Though also linguists and lexicographers, the brothers are known best for their collection of folklore. They published stories such as Rumpelstiltskin and Cinderella
1898 – Pavel Tretyakov, Russian businessman and art collector
Anniversaries
1809 – Napoleon Bonaparte divorces Empress Joséphine by French Senate. This was Joséphine’s second marriage, the first being to a man who was guillotined during the Reign of Terror
