1260 – Kublai Khan becomes ruler of the Mongol Empire
1494 – On his second voyage to New World, Christopher Columbus sights Jamaica
1780 – American Academy of Arts & Sciences forms in Boston
1855 – NYC regains Castle Clinton, to be used for immigration
1877 – Indian Wars: Sitting Bull leads his band of Lakota into Canada to avoid harassment by the United States Army under Colonel Nelson Miles.
1891 – Carnegie Hall opens, Tchaikovsky as guest conductor
1893 – Panic of 1893: Great crash on NY Stock Exchange
1912 – Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda begins publishing
1920 – President Wilson makes Communist Labor Party illegal
1942 – US begins rationing sugar during WW II
1943 – Postmaster General Frank C Walker invents Postal Zone System
1944 – Gandhi freed from prison
1944 – Russian offensive against Sebastopol, Crimea
1945 – World War II: Admiral Karl Dönitz, leader of Germany after Hitler’s death, orders all U-boats to cease offensive operations and return to their bases.
1961 – Alan Shepard becomes first American in space aboard Freedom 7
1965 – First large-scale US Army ground units arrive in South Vietnam
1969 – Pulitzer prize awarded to Norman Mailer (Armies of the Night)
1979 – Voyager 1 passes Jupiter
2012 – Japan shuts down its nuclear reactors leaving the country without nuclear power for the first time since 1970
Birthdays
867 – Uda, Emperor of Japan (d. 931)
1818 – Karl Marx, Trier, Prussia, philosopher (Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital), (d. 1883)
The original fearless young lady,
Elizabeth Jane Cochrane aka Nellie Bly
1865 – Nellie Bly, [Elizabeth Cochran Seaman], American journalist and writer (d. 1922) She was a pioneer in her field, and launched a new kind of investigative journalism when she wrote an exposé in which she faked insanity to study a mental institution from within.
On the effect of her experiences, she wrote:
“What, excepting torture, would produce insanity quicker than this treatment? “Here is a class of women sent to be cured. I would like the expert physicians who are condemning me for my action, which has proven their ability, to take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6 a.m. until 8 p.m. on straight-back benches, do not allow her to talk or move during these hours, give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or its doings, give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane. Two months would make her a mental and physical wreck.”
She was known for a record-breaking trip around the world in 72 days, in emulation of Jules Verne’s fictional character Phileas Fogg. Seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes and fourteen seconds after her Hoboken departure” Bly was back in New York City.
Deaths
1309 – Charles II, the Lame, King of Naples (1285-1309), dies
1821 – French emperor Napoleon Bonaparte (1799-1815), dies in exile on the island of Saint Helena
1981 – Bobby Sands, IRA activist/terrorist dies in the 66th day of his hunger strike
2011 – Claude Choules, last surviving World War I veteran (b. 1901)
Edited from various sources including historyorb.com, the NYTimes.com Wikipedia and other internet searches