AD 41 – After a night of negotiation, Claudius is accepted as Roman Emperor by the Senate.
1348 – A strong earthquake strikes the South Alpine region of Friuli in modern Italy, causing considerable damage to buildings as far away as Rome.
1533 – Henry VIII of England secretly marries Anne Boleyn.
1787 – Shays’s Rebellion: The rebellion’s largest confrontation, outside the Springfield Armory, results in the killing of four rebels and the wounding of twenty.
1858 – The Wedding March by Felix Mendelssohn is played at the marriage of Queen Victoria’s daughter, Victoria, and Friedrich of Prussia, and becomes a popular wedding processional.
1881 – Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell form the Oriental Telephone Company.
1890 – Nellie Bly completes her round-the-world journey in 72 days.
1915 – Alexander Graham Bell inaugurates U.S. transcontinental telephone service, speaking from New York to Thomas Watson in San Francisco.
1918 – Ukraine declares independence from Bolshevik Russia.
1947 – Thomas Goldsmith Jr. files a patent for a “Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device”, the first ever electronic game.
1961 – President John F. Kennedy delivers the first live presidential television news conference. Click here to view one of his press conferences displaying his wit and humor
1971 – Charles Manson and three female “Family” members are found guilty of the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders.
1995 – The Norwegian rocket incident: Russia almost launches a nuclear attack after it mistakes Black Brant XII, a Norwegian research rocket, for a US Trident missile.
1996 – Billy Bailey becomes the last person to be hanged in the USA. He was convicted of two murders and given the choice of lethal injection or hanging. As of 2015, the State of Washington and New Hampshire still permit hanging as a form of execution.
Births
1627 – Robert Boyle, Irish-English chemist and physicist (d. 1691)
1783 – William Colgate, English-American businessman and philanthropist, founded Colgate-Palmolive (d. 1857)
1874 – W. Somerset Maugham, French-English author and playwright (d. 1965)
1882 – Virginia Woolf, English novelist, essayist, short story writer, and critic (d. 1941)
1928 – Eduard Shevardnadze, Georgian general and politician, 2nd President of Georgia (d. 2014)
Deaths
844 – Pope Gregory IV (b. 795)
1881 – Konstantin Thon, Russian architect, designed the Grand Kremlin Palace and Cathedral of Christ the Saviour (b. 1794)
2005 – Philip Johnson, American architect, designed the PPG Place and Crystal Cathedral (b. 1906)
