Today in History

1542 – Pope Paul III creates Roman Inquisition to fight Protestantism.

1820 – Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted announces his discovery that an electrical current creates a magnetic field.

1861 – Confederate army defeats Union troops at Battle of Bull Run in Virginia, at start of American Civil War.

1873 – Jesse James and gang pull off the first train robbery in the US

West, taking US$3000 from the Rock Island Express in Iowa.

1925 – Te Haahi Rātana movement formally established as a church; teacher John T Scopes is convicted in Tennessee of violating state law for teaching theory of evolution. The conviction is later overturned.

1959 – A US District Court judge in New York City rules that DH Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover is not pornographic.

1960 – Sirimavo Bandaranaike, right, of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) becomes the world’s first elected female prime minister.

1969 – US Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin ‘‘Buzz’’ Aldrin Jr blast off from the Moon.

1983 – World’s lowest-ever natural temperature recorded, -89.2C at Soviet Vostok Station, Antarctica.

1994 – Dissident author Alexander Solzhenitsyn returns to Moscow 20 years after his expulsion.

2007 – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final book in the Harry Potter series, is released.

2008 – Ex-Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic is arrested in Belgrade by Serbian security forces.

Birthdays

Baron Paul Julius von Reuter, German-born news service pioneer (1816-99); Ernest Hemingway, US writer (1899-1961); Ken Starr, US lawyer who investigated Bill Clinton (1946-); Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), UK musician (1948-); Hirini Melbourne, Māori academic/ composer (1949-2003); Robin Williams, US actor (1951-2014); Ross Kemp, UK actor (1964-); Duncan Sarkies, NZ writer (1970-).