Today in History

1639 – Cambridge College, Massachusetts, is renamed Harvard for clergyman John Harvard.

1781 – German-born English astronomer William Hershel discovers Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun.

1868 – The first impeachment trial of a US president, Andrew Johnson, begins.

1881 – A revolutionary group assassinates Tsar Alexander II, left, by exploding a bomb in the streets of St Petersburg.

1884 – Using Greenwich, in London, as the point from which all time is measured, an international time standard is adopted across the United States.

1900 – France limits the length of the working day for women and children to 11 hours.

1913 – New Australian federal capital is officially named Canberra.

1930 – The Lowell Observatory in Arizona announces that astronomer Clyde Tombaugh has discovered a ninth planet, later named Pluto.

1956 – New Zealand wins its first cricket test, against the West Indies, in Auckland, after 22 losses and 22 draws in 26 years of test cricket.

1992 – A 6.2-magnitude quake in Turkey kills at least 570 people.

1996 – A gunman in Dunblane, Scotland, shoots to death 16 children and a teacher.

2001 – Peter Ellis, imprisoned for child sex abuse after a trial centring on the Christchurch Civic Creche, is denied a pardon.

2018 – US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is fired via a tweet from President Donald Trump.

Birthdays

Percival Lowell, US astronomer (1855-1916); Sir Hugh Walpole, NZborn novelist (1884-1941); L Ron Hubbard, US founder of Scientology (1911-86); Lady (Thea) Muldoon, NZ first lady (1927-2015); Neil Sedaka, US singer (1939-); Dame Sian Elias, former NZ chief justice (1949-); Neil Wagner, South African-born NZ cricketer.