Today in history
1492 — Christopher Columbus discovers island of Hispaniola, now divided between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
1877 — Thomas Edison demonstrates the first sound recording, reciting Mary Had a Little Lamb at West Orange, New Jersey.
1889 — Death of Jefferson Davis, first and only president of the Confederate States of America.
1907 — In one of America’s worst coal mine disasters, 361 die at Mononagh, West Virginia.
1917 — Republic of Finland is proclaimed; Collision between Belgian and French ammunition ships at Halifax, Nova Scotia, takes 1600 lives.
1921 — Britain signs peace treaty with Ireland under which Irish Free State is established and Ireland accepts Dominion status.
1941 — United States President Franklin D Roosevelt appeals for peace to Japan’s Emperor Hirohito – one day before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. He also authorises the Manhattan Project, which results in the creation of the atomic bomb.
1957 — America’s first attempt at putting a satellite into orbit blows up on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
1973 — Gerald Ford is sworn in as US vice-president following the resignation of Spiro Agnew over alleged financial irregularities.
1982 — Eleven soldiers and six civilians are killed when a bomb planted by the Irish National Liberation Army explodes in a pub in Ballykelly, Northern Ireland.
1985 — The National Gallery of Victoria buys Pablo Picasso’s Weeping Woman for $1.6 million.
1988 — Death of Roy Orbison, one of the greatest stars in American rock and country music.
1998 — Six years after staging a bloody coup attempt, former Lt Col Hugo Chavez is elected president of Venezuela, dealing a blow to the establishment that ruled the country for 40 years.
1999 — Georges Rutaganda, a leader of the Hutu militia group which led the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, is convicted of genocide by a UN tribunal and sentenced to life imprisonment.
2000 — Death of Werner Klemperer, the German-born character actor who played Colonel Klink on the TV sitcom Hogan’s Heroes.
2010 — A French court convicts Continental Airlines and one of its mechanics of manslaughter for setting off a chain of events that sent a supersonic Concorde crashing into a hotel outside Paris a decade earlier, killing 113 people and marking the beginning of the sleek jet’s demise.