Today in History
332 BC – Reputed date for the death of Greek philosopher Aristotle, right, aged 62.
321 – Roman Emperor Constantine I decrees that the dies Solis (sun day) is the day of rest in the Empire.
1530 – The Pope denies King Henry VIII’s request for a divorce from Catherine of Aragon.
1842 – Maketu¯ Whareto¯tara, 17, son of a Nga¯puhi chief, becomes the first person to be officially executed in New Zealand, for the murders of five people in the Bay of Islands.
1876 – Alexander Graham Bell receives a patent for his telephone.
1912 – Roald Amundsen announces he has reached the South Pole.
1918 – The Bolsheviks change their name to the Russian Communist Party.
1926 – The first successful trans-Atlantic radio-telephone conversation takes place, between New York City and London.
1933 – The game of Monopoly is invented.
1936 – Nazi Germany breaks conditions of the Treaty of Versailles by sending troops to the Rhineland.
1946 – Bikini Atoll islanders are evacuated by the US Government to make way for a nuclear testing site.
1947 – The Kuomintang and Communist Party of China resume full-fledged Civil War.
1965 – A march by civil rights demonstrators is broken up in Selma, Alabama, by state troopers and a sheriff’s posse.
1968 – The BBC broadcasts the news for the first time in colour on television.
1981 – Disneyland is the scene of a murder for the first time when an 18-year-old is stabbed to death.
1988 – Cyclone Bola hits the East Coast and Hawke’s Bay, damaging houses, sweeping away bridges and sections of roads and railway lines. Three people die in a car swept away by floodwaters.
1999 – Death of film director Stanley Kubrick.
2005 – A fire set by rioting gang members kills 134 inmates of a provincial jail in the Dominican Republic.
2006 – A series of bombings rock a railway station and temple in Varanasi, Hinduism’s holiest city, killing 20 and injuring dozens.
2010 – Kathryn Bigelow becomes the first woman to win a best director Oscar, for The Hurt Locker.