Today in history

1430 – Joan of Arc is captured by the Burgundians, who sell her to the English.

1455 – Battle of St Albans is fought in Britain’s War of the Roses.

1533 – Marriage of England’s King Henry VIII to Catherine of Aragon is declared null and void.

1785 – In a letter to a friend, Benjamin Franklin reveals his invention of spectacles of two thicknesses, the first bifocals.

1797 – During a financial crisis, a cartoon by James Gilray appears depicting the Bank of England as a haggard old woman. This is generally thought to be the origin of the bank’s nickname The Old Lady of Threadneedle Street.

1868 – Kit Carson, American frontiersman and soldier who contributed greatly to the westward expansion of the US, dies.

1901 – Gaetano Brecci, assassin of King Umberto of Italy, commits suicide.

1926 – Lebanon is proclaimed a republic by France.

1934 – Aviatrix Jean Batten arrives in Darwin in a DH-60M Moth, setting a women’s record for England-australia flights of 14 days 23 hours 25 minutes; US outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow are killed in a police ambush in Louisiana.

1937 – John D Rockefeller, US multimillionaire and founder of the Standard Oil Company, dies.

1945 – Nazi SS Chief Heinrich Himmler commits suicide while imprisoned in Luneburg, Germany.

1993 – More than 1.5 million Cambodians ignore Khmer Rouge threats and vote in the country’s first free elections in more than two decades.

1995 – Israel suspends plans to confiscate Arab land in east Jerusalem, acknowledging that it can no longer act at will to strengthen the Jewish hold on the city.

2002 – A heat wave strikes India and kills 1030 people, mainly in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. Temperatures reached a record 51 degrees celsius.

2009 – Former South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, 62, leaps to his death amid a widening corruption scandal.

2011 – A dense ash cloud from an Icelandic volcano blows toward Scotland, causing airlines to cancel flights, forcing US President Barack Obama to shorten a visit to Ireland, and raising fears of a repeat of last year’s huge travel disruptions in Europe that stranded millions of passengers.

2015 – John Forbes Nash Jr, 86, a mathematical genius whose struggle with schizophrenia was chronicled in the movie A Beautiful Mind dies in a car crash in New Jersey.

Today’s Birthdays: Carl von Linne (Linnaeus), Swedish botanist (1707-1778); Jewel, American singer (1974-).