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878 – Syracuse is captured by the Muslim sultan of Sicily.
1260 – Kublai Khan of the Mongol Empire sends his envoy Hao Jing and two other advisors to the Song Dynasty court of Emperor Lizong of Song; while attempting to negotiate with the Song in order to resolve their conflict, Hao Jing and his fellow emissaries are imprisoned by order of the high Chancellor of China, Jia Sidao.
1602 – Martha’s Vineyard first sighted by Captain Bartholomew Gosnold
1758 – 10 year old Mary Campbell was abducted from her home in Pennsylvania by Lenape Indians during the French and Indian War.
While captive, she lived among the family of Chief Netawatwees in the Ohio Valley and was freed six years later in a famous release of captives
orchestrated by Colonel Henry Bouquet at the conclusion of Pontiac’s War. Pontiac’s War was a united Indian effort to push the settlers back to
the Atlantic but failed miserably.
1819 – First bicycles (swift walkers) introduced in NYC
On this day in 1819 the first bicycle was seen in New York City. Alternately called “velocipedes,” “swift walkers,” “hobby horses” or “dandy horses” for the dandies that most often rode them, they had been imported from London that same year. Pedal and chain bicycles of today came from the invention of Pierre Lallement of France, who saw one of the dandy horses in a park and was inspired to add a transmission to it. After a brief stint manufacturing them in France, Lallement decided to move to the U.S. There, with James Carroll of New Haven, Connecticut as his financier, he filed the earliest U.S. patent for a pedal bicycle.
1846 – First steamship arrives in Hawaii
1881 – American Red Cross founded by Clara Barton
1894 – 22-year-old French anarchist Émile Henry is executed by guillotine
1927 – Lindbergh lands in Paris after first solo air crossing of Atlantic
1929 – Automatic electric stock quotation board installed in New York
1932 – First transatlantic solo flight by a woman (Amelia Earhart) lands in Ireland
1936 – Sada Abe is arrested after wandering the streets of Tokyo. She was a Japanese woman who is remembered for erotically asphyxiating her lover, Kichizo Ishida on May 18, 1936, and then cutting off his penis and testicles and carrying them around with her in her handbag. The story became a national sensation in Japan, acquiring mythic overtones, and has since been interpreted by artists, philosophers, novelists and filmmakers.
1951 – The opening of the Ninth Street Show, otherwise known as the 9th Street Art Exhibition – a gathering of a number of notable artists, and the stepping-out of the post war New York avant-garde, collectively know as the New York School.
1968 – Nuclear-powered sub USS Scorpion, with 99 men, reported missing and is later found at the bottom of the ocean off Azores
1969 – Robert Kennedy’s murderer Sirhan Sirhan sentenced to death:later commuted to life imprisonmnet 1972 – Michelangelo’s Pietà in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome is damaged by a vandal.
2004 – Sherpa Pemba Dorjie climbs Mount Everest in 8 hours 10 minutes, breaking his rival Sherpa Lakpa Gelu’s record from the previous year.
Birthdays
1471 – Albrecht Durer, Nornberg Germany, Renaissance painter/print maker
1688 – Alexander Pope, English poet
1898 – Armand Hammer, millionaire industrialist (Occidental Petroleum)
1904 – Fats Waller, born Thomas Wright, jazz singer/composer (Ain’t Misbehavin’)
1921 – Andrei Sakharov, Moscow, physicist, human rights worker (Nobel ’75)
1951 – Al Franken, former US senator, comedian/writer/actor
Deaths
1542 – Hernando de Soto, dies while searching for gold, near Mississippi River
1935 – Jane Addams, a founder of ACLU (Nobel 1973), dies at 65
1992 – Mrithi, gorilla (Gorilla in the Mist), dies at 24
2000 – Sir John Gielgud, British actor (b. 1904)
2003 – Alejandro de Tomaso, Argentine-Italian racing driver and car manufacturer (b. 1928)
Edited from various sources including historyorb.com, the NYTimes.com and many other Google searches
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