Today in history
Today is Friday, July 21, the 202nd day of 2017. There are 163 days left in the year. Highlights in history on this date:
1542 — Pope Paul III establishes the Roman Inquisition to fight Protestantism.
1683 — Lord William Russell is beheaded in
England for plotting to kill King Charles II.
1718 — Austria and Venice gain substantial lands in the Balkans from Turkey by the Peace of Passarowitz (Pozarevac).
1796 — Death of Robert Burns, Scottish national poet.
1798 — France’s Napoleon Bonaparte defeats the Egyptians at the Battle of the Pyramids and becomes master of Egypt.
1820 — Danish physicist Hans Christian Oersted announces his discovery that an electrical current creates a magnetic field.
1831 — Prince Leopold of SaxeCoburgSaalfeld is crowned the first king of newly independent Belgium, prompting the Dutch to invade.
1861 — The Confederate army defeats Union troops at the Battle of Bull Run in the United States state of Virginia.
1864 — The first daily black newspaper in the US,
The New Orleans Tribune, begins publication, putting out both English and French editions.
1865 —Architect William Mason becomes Dunedin’s first mayor, winning 495 votes, almost 100 votes clear of his nearest rival, James Paterson.
1873 — Jesse James and his gang pull off the first train robbery in America, taking $US3000 from the Rock Island Express in Adair, Iowa. 1904 — The TransSiberian Railway is completed. 1925 — The Monkey Trial ends in Dayton, Tennessee, with John Scopes convicted of violating state law for teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution. The conviction is later overturned.
1957 — Althea Gibson becomes the first black woman to win a major tennis title, doing it in grand fashion: she wins Wimbledon, the US
Open and the US women’s clay court championship en route to being named female athlete of the year.
1960 — Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, becomes the world’s first woman prime minister; Francis Chichester, English navigator and yachtsman, arrives in New York aboard
Gypsy Moth II, setting a record of 40 days for a solo Atlantic crossing.
1969 — US Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin blast off from the moon and head back to Earth after man’s first lunar landing.
1976 — The American Legion begins a fourday convention in Philadelphia. As a result of what becomes known as Legionnaire’s disease, 29 members die.
1987 — American TV personality Mary Hart of
Entertainment Tonight insures her legs with Lloyds of London for $US2 million.
1991 — The Greek tanker Kirki breaks open off the West Australian coast, spilling 20,000 tonnes of crude oil into the sea.
1994 — Britain’s Labour Party elects Tony Blair leader, succeeding the late John Smith; former dissident author Alexander Solzhenitsyn returns to Moscow 20 years after he was expelled.
2001 — Flash floods triggered by torrential rain and hailstorms leave at least 30 people dead and 100 injured in northwest Iran.
2002 — WorldCom Inc, the secondlargest US telecommunications company, files for the largest US bankruptcy, a month after disclosing it had inflated cash flow by $US3.8 billion.
2007 — India elects Pratibha Patil as the country’s first female president.
2013 — A 6.5magnitude earthquake centred on Seddon strikes at 5pm, causing widespread damage throughout the Marlborough and Wellington areas. Residents are warned that the swarm of earthquakes that began in the area two days earlier may continue for some weeks.