ON THIS DAY
1417 Martin V is unanimously elected pope, ending the Great Schism. 1831 Former slave Nat Turner, leader of a significant and bloody slave rebellion, is hanged in Jerusalem, Virginia. More than 60 whites were slain.
1863 Elizabeth Scott, aged about 23, is the first woman to be executed in Victoria where she is hanged with two male accomplices for the murder of her husband.
1880 Bushranger Ned Kelly, 25, is hanged at Old Melbourne Gaol, for murdering a policeman.
1918 Allied commanders, led by Marshal Ferdinand Foch, and German officers sign an armistice document in Foch’s railway carriage in a forest at Compiegne, France, at 5am. Six hours later World War I comes to an end.
1923 Nazi Party leader Adolf Hitler is arrested near Munich after the failed Beer Hall Putsch.
1941 The Australian War Memorial opens in Canberra. Built with one world war in mind, it opens amid another huge global conflict.
1959 Film director Charles Chauvel, 62, dies.
1966 Gemini 12, the last spacecraft in the Gemini series and the first to make an automatically controlled re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, is launched.
1975 Governor-General John Kerr (above) sacks Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and his Labor government after the Senate fails to pass the budget.
1983 Prime Minister Bob Hawke announces the return of the Olgas and Ayers Rock (Uluru) to traditional owners.
1992 The Church of England votes to ordain women as priests. The first ordination would take place two years later.
2006 Actor Belinda Emmett, 32, wife of Rove McManus, dies of bone cancer at St Vincent’s Hospital, Sydney.