326 – The old St. Peter’s Basilica is consecrated.
401 – The Visigoths, led by king Alaric I, cross the Alps and invade northern Italy.
1095 – The Council of Clermont begins: called by Pope Urban II, it led to the First Crusade to the Holy Land..
1307 – According to legend, William Tell shoots an apple off his son’s head.
1421 – A seawall at the Zuiderzee dike in the Netherlands breaks, flooding 72 villages and killing about 10,000 people. This event will be known as St. Elizabeth’s flood.
1626 – The new St. Peter’s Basilica is consecrated.
1865 – Mark Twain’s short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” is published in the New York Saturday Press.
1878 – Soprano Marie Selika Williams became the first Black artist to perform at the White House, Washington D.C.
1883 – American and Canadian railroads institute five standard continental time zones, ending the confusion of thousands of local times.
1928 – Release of the animated short Steamboat Willie, the first fully synchronized sound cartoon, directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, featuring the third appearances of cartoon characters Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse.
1929 – Grand Banks earthquake: Off the south coast of Newfoundland in the Atlantic Ocean, a Richter magnitude 7.2 submarine earthquake, centered on the Grand Banks, breaks 12 submarine transatlantic telegraph cables and triggers a tsunami that destroys many south coast communities in the Burin Peninsula.
1961 – United States President John F. Kennedy sends 18,000 military advisors to South Vietnam.
1963 – The first push-button telephone goes into service.
1978 – In Jonestown, Guyana, Jim Jones led his Peoples Temple to a mass murder-suicide that claimed 918 lives in all, 909 of them in Jonestown itself, including over 270 children. Congressman Leo Ryan is murdered by members of the Peoples Temple hours earlier.
1993 – In the United States, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is approved by the House of Representatives.
Births
1736 – Carl Friedrich Christian Fasch, German harpsichord player and composer (d. 1800)
1787 – Louis Daguerre, French physicist and photographer, developed the daguerreotype (d. 1851)
1901 – George Gallup, American statistician and academic (d. 1984)
1923 – Alan Shepard, American admiral, pilot, and astronaut (d. 1998)
1970 – Megyn Kelly, American lawyer and journalist
Deaths
1886 – Chester A. Arthur, American general, lawyer, and politician, 21st President of the United States (b. 1829)
1922 – Marcel Proust, French author and critic (b. 1871)
1962 – Niels Bohr, Danish physicist, and academic, Nobel Prize laureate
1969 – Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., American businessman and diplomat, 44th United States Ambassador to the United Kingdom (b. 1888)
1976 – Man Ray, American-French photographer and painter (b. 1890)
1994 – Cab Calloway, American singer-songwriter and bandleader
