1478 – The Pazzi family attack Lorenzo de’ Medici and kill his brother Giuliano during High Mass in Florence Cathedral.
1564 – William Shakespeare is baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England
1607 – English colonists make landfall at Cape Henry, Virginia.
1777 – Sybil Ludington, aged 16, rode 40 miles to alert American colonial forces to the approach of the British regular forces
1803 – Thousands of meteor fragments fall from the skies of L’Aigle, France; the event convinces European scientists that meteors exist.
1865 – Union cavalry troopers corner and shoot dead John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, in Virginia.
1933 – The Gestapo, the official secret police force of Nazi Germany, is established.
1956 – On this date, ‘Containerization’ was born. The Ideal X, a converted World War II oil tanker, left Newark ladened with 58 containers off loaded from trucks. Malcolm McLean, a North Carolinian bought one truck in 1934 and built his company into a fleet of 1,800 trucks. He lamented lost time loading and unloading, and in an effort to save money on taxes (because trucks have to pay road taxes to states they pass through, he conceived of a new loading system whereby the truck’s containers would be separated and loaded onto ships.
These days, the giant ships are capable of carrying 18,000 containers.
1958 – Final run of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad’s Royal Blue from Washington, D.C., to New York City after 68 years, the first U.S. passenger train to use electric locomotives.
1962 – NASA’s Ranger 4 spacecraft crashes into the Moon. 1986 – A nuclear reactor accident occurs at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plantin the Soviet Union (now Ukraine), creating the world’s worst nuclear disaster.
2018 – American comedian Bill Cosby is found guilty of sexual assault.
Births
121 – Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor (d. 180)
1575 – Marie de’ Medici, queen of Henry IV of France (d. 1642)
1822 – Frederick Law Olmsted, American journalist and designer, co-designed Central Park (d. 1903)
1914 – Bernard Malamud, American novelist and short story writer (d. 1986)
1917 – I. M. Pei, architect, designed the National Gallery of Art and Bank of China Tower
1970 – Melania Trump, Slovene-American model; First Lady of the United States; wife of Donald Trump
Deaths
1478 – Giuliano de’ Medici, Italian ruler (b. 1453)
1489 – Ashikaga Yoshihisa, Japanese shōgun (b. 1465)
1940 – Carl Bosch, German chemist and engineer, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1874)
1984 – Count Basie, American pianist, composer, and bandleader (b. 1904)
1989 – Lucille Ball, American model, actress, comedian, and producer (b. 1911)
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