TODAY IN HISTORY: Dunkirk evacuation begins
In 1232, Pope Gregory IX sent the first Inquisition team to Aragon in Spain, after turning its details over to the Dominicans the previous year.
In 1538, Geneva expelled Protestant church reformer John Calvin. His rigorous plans for reform of church and city clashed with the Swiss city’s long-standing moral indifference.
In 1805, Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned King of Italy.
In 1858, In Pittsburgh, the Associate Presbyterian and the Associate Reformed Presbyterian churches merged to form the United Presbyterian Church in North America.
In 1874, the Dominion Elections Act became law. It introduced the secret ballot and simultaneous elections, and abolished property qualifications for MPs.
In 1887, the main line of the Canadian Pacific Railway was opened for public traffic — 18 months after the last spike was driven at
Craigellachie, B.C. Trains had been running from Montreal to Vancouver for a year, but passengers now could ride all the way on 4,700 kilometres of CPR track.
In 1896, 55 occupants of a streetcar died when a bridge collapsed in Victoria.
In 1940, the evacuation of allied troops from Dunkirk, France, began during the Second World War.
In 1943, Quebec passed a law requiring free and compulsory education in the province.
In 1946, physicists Janos Von Neumann and Klaus Fuchs were granted a patent for the fusion or “H-bomb.”
In 1969, the “Apollo 10” astronauts returned to Earth after an eight-day dress rehearsal for the first manned moon landing by the U.S.
In 1972, U.S. President Richard M. Nixon and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev signed the AntiBallistic Missile Treaty in Moscow.
In 2003, a CF-18 jet crashed during training exercises near Cold Lake, Alta., killing the 38year-old pilot.
In 2004, Labrador Inuit voted to accept a historic land claim that would create a region of self-government on 15,800 square kilometres of northern Labrador, to be called Nunatsiavut.
In 2004, nine years after after the Oklahoma City bombing, Terry Nichols was found guilty of 161 murder charges for helping carry out the attack. He later received 161 consecutive life sentences.
In 2008, Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier was forced to resign over a security breach involving classified documents left in his former girlfriend’s Montreal apartment.
In 2011, Gen. Ratko Mladic, Europe’s most wanted war crimes fugitive, was arrested in Serbia.
In 2016, Conservatives bid farewell to Stephen Harper, whose speech at the party convention was his first in months.