TODAY IN HISTORY
1588 — English army assembles at Tilbury to repel invasion by Spanish Armada.
1595 — Spanish land at Cornwall, England, and burn Mousehold and Penzance before returning to their ships.
1829 — The first typewriter is patented by William Burt of Mt Vernon, Michigan.
1882 — Koreans attack Japanese legation in Seoul, the Korean capital, provoking intervention by Japanese and Chinese troops.
1903 — The Ford Motor Company sells its first car.
1904 — The icecream cone is invented by Charles E Menches during the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St Louis.
1913 — Second Revolution breaks out in south China to force from power military commander Yuan Shih-kai. He wins the armed struggle, ending hope for democracy in China after the abdication of the emperor.
1914 — Austria and Hungary issue ultimatum to Serbia after assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. The dispute leads to World War I.
1920 — King Faisal’s Arab army is defeated at Maysaloun, and Syria falls under French control.
1921 — The first meeting of the Chinese Communist Party is held in Shanghai. Thirteen delegates represent 50 members.
1958 — Queen Elizabeth names four women to peerages – the first women to sit in Britain’s House of Lords.
1974 — Greece’s military rulers announce they will turn nation back to civilian rule.
1983 — A regional struggle for independence by Tamils in Sri Lanka’s north and east escalates into a civil war when they kill 13 Sri Lankan soldiers. The nation’s Sinhalese majority responds by killing hundreds of Tamil civilians in the south.
1996 — Aided by US spy photographs, war crimes investigators in Bosnia recover more than a dozen bodies thought to belong to Muslims executed after the fall of the city of Srebrenica.
1997 — Swiss banks publish lists of WWII era depositors in newspaper advertisements throughout the world.
2013 — Prince William and his wife Kate present their newborn son to the world for the first time.2015 — At least 35 people are killed in a boat crash on Egypt’s Nile. Today’s Birthdays: Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia (1891-1975); Woody Harrelson, US actor (1961-); Daniel Radcliffe, British actor (1989-); Philip Seymour Hoffman, US actor (1967-2014); Alison Krauss, US country singer (1971-).