Today in History

1789 – French revolutionaries storm the Bastille, a royal fortress and prison that had come to symbolise the tyranny of the Bourbon monarchs.

1853 – New Zealand’s first general election begins.

1865 – British mountaineer Edward Whymper becomes the first person to climb the Matterhorn.

1867 – Alfred Nobel first demonstrates his invention, dynamite, at a quarry in the UK.

1881 – Sheriff Pat Garrett fatally shoots Henry McCarty (Billy the Kid) at a ranch in New Mexico.

1946 – Dr Benjamin Spock’s Baby And Child Care is published.

1950 – Sir Ā pirana Ngata, left, NZ statesman, dies aged 76.

1958 – Iraq’s King Faisal II is assassinated in an army coup.

1984 – David Lange and Labour defeat Robert Muldoon’s ruling National Party in a snap election.

1995 – A revolutionary technology that would shake up the recording industry is christened ‘‘MP3’’.

1998 – Death of Richard McDonald, pioneer of the fast-food concept that evolved into McDonald’s.

2007 – Los Angeles Catholic archdiocese reaches a $660m settlement with more than 500 alleged victims of clergy sex abuse.

2014 – Alice Coachman Davis, a US athlete who was the first black woman to win an Olympic gold medal, dies aged 90.

2016 – A truck is driven into crowds in the French city of Nice by a lone terrorist, killing 86 people.

Birthdays

Gustav Klimt, Austrian artist (1862-1918); Gertrude Bell, UK archaeologist/ spy (1868-1926); Lucy Moore, NZ botanist/ecologist (1906-87); Woody Guthrie, US musician (1912-67); Gerald Ford, US president (1913-2006); Ingmar Bergman, Swedish director (19182007); Bruce Ferguson, former NZ Defence Force head (1949-); Anne Hegerty, UK quizzer (1958-); Phoebe Waller-Bridge, UK actor/ writer (1985-); Conor McGregor, Irish MMA fighter (1988-).