1864 – American Civil War: The Red River Campaign begins as a US Navy fleet of 13 Ironclads and 7 Gunboats and other support ships enter the Red River.
1868 – Henry O’Farrell attempts to assassinate Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh.
1894 – Coca-Cola is bottled and sold for the first time in Vicksburg, Mississippi, by local soda fountain operator Joseph Biedenharn.
1912 – The Girl Guides (later renamed the Girl Scouts of the USA) are founded in the United States.
1914 – Julia Lennon, English mother of John Lennon (d. 1958) was born.
1918 – Moscow becomes the capital of Russia again after Saint Petersburg held this status for 215 years.
1922 – The British run government in India has arrested Mahatma Gandhi who has always preached passive resistance to British rule by telling his followers to not buy goods from Europe or work with the British administration machine, he has a massive following in India and many believe a civil uprising could follow his arrest.
1930 – Mahatma Gandhi leads a 200-mile march, known as the Salt March, to the sea in defiance of British opposition, to protest the British monopoly on salt
1932 – Andrew Young, American pastor and politician, 14th United States Ambassador to the United Nations was born.
1933 – Great Depression: Franklin D. Roosevelt addresses the nation for the first time as President of the United States. This is also the first of his “fireside chats”.
1938 – Lew DeWitt, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (The Statler Brothers) (d. 1990) was born.
1940 – Winter War: Finland signs the Moscow Peace Treaty with the Soviet Union, ceding almost all of Finnish Karelia. Finnish troops and the remaining population are immediately evacuated.
1945 – Anne Frank, author of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” died at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp from Typhus during a typhus epidemic that spread through the concentration camp.
1946 – Frank Welker, American voice actor was born.
1947 – Mitt Romney, American businessman and politician, 70th Governor of Massachusetts was birthed.
1947 – Very soon after the war President Truman had decided that to use America to stop the spread of communism around the world telling congress the country must intervene wherever necessary throughout the world to prevent the subjection of free people to Communist inspired totalitarian regimes at the expense of their national integrity.
1956 – Steve Harris, English bass player and songwriter (Iron Maiden) was born.
1957 – Marlon Jackson, American singer-songwriter and dancer (The Jackson 5) was born.
1964 – The president of the powerful American Teamsters union James Hoffa is found guilty and sentenced to eight years on bribery charges. He had been on trial 4 times earlier but had not been found guilty.
He appealed against the convictions and in 1966 while still going through the appeal process he was re-elected president of the lorry drivers’ union in July 1966 – despite two prison sentences totaling 13 years hanging over him.
1969 – The police search former Beatles George Harrison’s home for illegal drugs. This was a year after John Lennon had been searched for hash (substance derived from marijuana).
1969 – Beatle Paul McCartney Marries American Linda Eastman in London
1980 – A jury finds John Wayne Gacy Jr. ( also known as The Killer Clown ) guilty of the murders of 33 boys and young men, he had admitted the murders but he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.
He had started his murders in 1972 and continued till 1978 when he was caught, 27 were found in a crawl space under the floor of his house and others were found in nearby rivers.
1993 – Several bombs explode in Bombay (Mumbai), India, killing about 300 and injuring hundreds more.
1993 – North Korea nuclear weapons program: North Korea says that it plans to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and refuses to allow inspectors access to its nuclear sites.
1993 – The Blizzard of 1993 – Snow begins to fall across the eastern portion of the US with tornadoes, thunder snow storms, high winds and record low temperatures. The storm lasts for 30 hours.
1993 – Janet Reno is sworn in as the United States’ first female attorney general.
1994 – The Church of England ordains its first female priests.
1999 – Former Warsaw Pact members the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland join NATO.
2002 – Andrea Yates, a 37-year-old housewife who drowned her five children in the bathtub of her Texas home in June, 2001 is found guilty
2003 – 15-year-old Elizabeth Smart was found in Utah nine months after being kidnapped from her home. Her abductors (employee who worked at the Smart’s home, and his wife) were captured as well, and were charged of kidnapping, burglary, and sexual assault.
2004 – The President of South Korea, Roh Moo-hyun, is impeached by its National Assembly: the first such impeachment in the nation’s history.
2006 – The Chicago Tribune has compiled a list of 2,653 C.I.A. employees by searching the Internet. The newspaper states that Washington was uncertain of whether the Bush Administration had revealed the names of covert C.I.A. operatives to the press, and asserts that getting this sort of information is not so very difficult. Today’s Chicago Tribune reports that it had found the names by searching commercial databases on the Internet. The Tribune’s deputy managing editor for news has edited the story, and says that the paper was surprised by how much it could learn from its online sources (including supposedly undercover operatives’ names). He said that: We were able to get identities, internal agency telephone numbers and the locations of some two dozen secret C.I.A. facilities around the United States. It has not published the names at the C.I.A’s request. A C.I.A. spokeswoman has admitted that this will force the Agency to change its methods of protecting information.
2009 – Financier Bernard Madoff pleads guilty in New York to scamming $18 billion, the largest in Wall Street history.
2009 – The Iraqi journalist that threw his shoes at President Bush has been jailed for three years. Muntadar al-Zaidi told the court that his actions were ‘just like any Iraqi’ against the leader of an occupying force. Shoe hurling is a grave insult in Arab culture. Al-Zaidi has been hailed as a hero in the Arab world.
2011 – A reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant melts and explodes and releases radioactivity into the atmosphere a day after Japan’s earthquake.
2012 – Michael Hossack, American drummer (Doobie Brothers) (b. 1946) died.
2012 – Armed robbers killed at least nine people in an attack on a gold market in Baghdad. At least another fourteen people were injured from the robbery. Police stated that two cars full of gunmen attacked in the Ur district of the city where many jewelry shops were located in a mainly Shia area of the city. One of the men involved was arrested after the incident, but many of the others managed to escape.
2013 – Clive Burr, English drummer and songwriter (Iron Maiden, Samson, and Trust) (b. 1957) died.
2014 – US President Barack Obama met with Ukraine’s interim Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk and pledged to back Ukraine in its dispute with Russia.
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