Today in History

1349 – Up to 3000 Jews are killed in Black Death riots in Erfurt, Germany.

1556 – The Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, is burnt at the stake as a heretic.

1826 – Ludwig van Beethoven’s String Quartet No 13 in B flat major (Op 130)

premieres in Vienna.

1829 – An earthquake in Spain kills 6000. 1860 – The English novelist George Eliot finishes her novel The Mill on the Floss in London.

1871 – Journalist Henry Morton Stanley, right, begins his famous search through

Africa for the missing British explorer Dr David Livingstone.

1917 – Tsar Nicholas II and his family are arrested by revolutionary forces in Russia.

1918 – The Second Battle of the Somme, the last German offensive in World War I, begins. 1919 – The Soviet Republic is proclaimed. 1935 – Persia is officially renamed Iran.

1940 – Rebecca, an Oscar-winning movie based on the book by Daphne du Maurier, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, premieres in Miami, Florida. .

1941 – Joe Louis knocks out Abe Simon in 13

rounds of their heavyweight boxing title fight.

1943 – An assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler fails.

1960 – Almost 70 people are killed and more than 180 wounded when South African police fire on a black demonstration at Sharpeville.

1961 – The Beatles’ first appearance at the Cavern Club in Liverpool.

1963 – Alcatraz prison in San Francisco Bay is closed.

1965 – Martin Luther King and more than 3000 demonstrators begin a march from

Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, the state capital, in favour of voting rights.

1975 – Ethiopia abolishes its monarchy after 3000 years.

1980 – US President Jimmy Carter announces the US will boycott the Moscow Olympics; on the TV show Dallas, J R is shot.

1994 – Anna Paquin, aged 11, becomes the first New Zealander to win an acting Oscar, as best supporting actress in The Piano.

2003 – Race Relations Day is formally observed for the first time in New Zealand. The date marks the 1960 Sharpeville massacre.

2014 – Russia annexes Crimea, to international condemnation.

2018 – Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg admits it ‘‘made mistakes’’ after data on 50 million users is harvested by Cambridge Analytica.