Today in history
Today is Saturday, June 10, the 161st day of 2017. There are 204 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1190 — Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa drowns trying to cross the Saleph River in Cilicia (now in Turkey) while on the Third Crusade to free Jerusalem.
1793 — The first public zoo, the Jardin des Plantes, opens in Paris.
1794 — The power of French revolutionary tribunals is increased, leading to mass executions.
1875 — The Waste Lands Board leases a site at Mataura Falls to an Invercargill company as a site for paper manufacturing.
1886 — Mt Tarawera erupts, spreading ash over 16,000 square kilometres and destroying the Pink and White Terraces and three Maori villages. The eruption lasted for an estimated six hours and
153 are thought to have lost their lives.
1889 — Initiated by the Rev Rutherford Waddell, New Zealand’s first free kindergarten opens at the Walker St (now Carroll St) mission hall, Dunedin, with 16 children enrolled. By the end of the year the roll was 60.
1893 — Dunedin is blanketed in several inches of snow.
1901 — The Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and
York (later King George V and Queen Mary) begin a royal visit to New Zealand. The next day a new park on land below One Tree Hill, Auckland, is named Cornwall Park, to commemorate their visit.
1903 — The unpopular King Alexander of Serbia and his wife are murdered in a palace coup.
1906 — Richard Seddon, affectionately called ‘‘King Dick’’, dies suddenly during a voyage back to New Zealand from Sydney. Serving for just over 13 years, he is the second of five New Zealand prime ministers to have died while in office.
1909 — The SOS distress signal is used for the first time by the Cunard liner SS Slavonia, wrecked off the Azores.
1917 — Sinn Fein riots break out in Dublin. 1924 — Giacomo Matteotti, Italian Socialist leader, is kidnapped and murdered by fascists.
1933 — The Australian Women’s Weekly is first published.
1935 — Alcoholics Anonymous is founded in Akron, Ohio, by William G. Wilson and Dr Robert Smith.
1942 — German Gestapo kill male residents of Lidice, Czechoslovakia, in retaliation for the assassination of a German official.
1943 — Hungarian journalist Laszlo Biro patents his ballpoint pen.
1944 — Nazi troops massacre nearly all the residents of Oradoursur Glane, France, in a reprisal against the French resistance movement.
1946 — Italy decides in a referendum to replace its abolished monarchy with a republic.
1959 — The first lectures in the training course for hydatids control officers from around the country begin in Dunedin.
1967 — Israel agrees to a ceasefire with Egypt, having conquered territory four times its size during the SixDay War.
1975 — A new geriatric hospital complex for the Little Sisters of the Poor, to be built on a 1.2ha site in the Dunedin suburb of Brockville, is announced. The $2 million 90bed complex will replace an Andersons Bay facility that had been in operation since 1907.
1995 — New Zealand actor Bruno Lawrence dies from lung cancer.
2014 — Otago’s Jimmy Neesham becomes the first New Zealander and the eighth international cricket player to score a century in each of his