Today in History

1705 – Isaac Newton is knighted in Cambridge by Queen Anne.

1746 – Royalist troops defeat the Jacobite army of Prince Charles Edward Stuart at Culloden, Scotland, the last battle fought on British soil.

1892 – The New Zealand Rugby Football Union is founded in Wellington.

1912 – American aviator Harriet Quimby becomes the first woman to fly across the English Channel, leaving Dover and arriving near Calais 59 minutes later.

1917 – Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin returns secretly to Russia after a decade in exile.

1962 – Bob Dylan debuts his song Blowin’ in the Wind at Gerde’s Folk City in New York.

1973 – Waikato farmer Arthur Allan Thomas, left, is found guilty for the second time of the 1970 murder of his neighbours Harvey and Jeanette Crewe.

1977 – Alex Haley, author of the best-seller Roots, visits the Gambian village where he believed his ancestor Kunte Kinte was captured as a slave in 1767.

1996 – Britain’s Prince Andrew and his wife, Sarah, announce they are in the process of divorcing.

2007 – A 23-year-old student at Virginia Tech college shoots dead 32 people and wounds about a dozen, before taking his own life. 2020 – US President Donald Trump gives state governors a road map for easing coronavirus restrictions; New York governor

Andrew Cuomo says the state will extend stay-at-home restrictions for at least another month.

Birthdays

Wilbur Wright, US aviator (18671912); Charlie Chaplin, UK-born actor (1889-1977); Spike Milligan, UK writer/actor (1918-2002); Kingsley Amis, UK writer (1922-95); Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI (1927-); Dusty Springfield, UK singer (1939-99); Peter Garrett, Australian singer/ politician (1953-); Claire Foy, UK actor (1984-).