ON THIS day
1770
Lt James Cook, captain of the Endeavour, and his crew become the first Englishmen to sight the east coast of Australia.
1775
Tensions between the British and the American colonists finally boil over into revolution, with British defeats at skirmishes known as the Battles of Lexington and Concord.
1824
English poet Lord Byron dies from fever at 36 while helping Greek rebels fight Ottoman Turks for independence.
1873
Hamilton Hume dies in Yass at 75, bitter and obsessed by fear that his feats of exploration would be credited to William Hovell. The former partners had a misunderstanding.
1882
Naturalist Charles Darwin dies from a heart attack in Kent at the age of 73. He is given a state funeral and buried in Westminster Abbey.
1927
Mae West (above) is sentenced to 10 days jail and given a $500 fine for “obscenity and corrupting the morals of youth” for her play Sex.
1966
The first Australian conscripts to serve in Vietnam fly out from Richmond air base, Sydney.
1993
After a 51-day standoff with US federal agents, some 80 members of the millennialist Branch Davidian religious group perish in a fire at their compound near Waco, Texas.
1995
In what was the worst act of terrorism in U.S. history up to that time, a truck bomb nearly destroys the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 and injuring more than 500 people.
2004
Australian Charlie Bell, 43, becomes CEO of McDonald’s worldwide. He steps down only weeks later after being diagnosed with colon cancer and he dies in 2005.
2011
Fidel Castro resigns as First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, his brother Raul is later selected to replace him.