TODAY IN HISTORY
1897
Activist Marguerite Durand founds the newspaper La Fronde in Paris.
1905 1911
A mine explosion near Briceville, Tennessee, kills 84 miners despite rescue efforts led by the United States Bureau of Mines.
1922
Gabriel Narutowicz is elected the first president of Poland.
1931
The Constituent Cortes approves a constitution which establishes the Second Spanish Republic.
1935
Student protests in Beiping (now Beijing)’s Tiananmen Square, dispersed by government.
1935
Walter Liggett, American newspaper editor and muckraker, is killed in a gangland murder.
1935
The Downtown Athletic Club Trophy, later renamed the Heisman Trophy, is awarded for the first time.
1937
Second Sino-Japanese War: Japanese troops under the command of Lt Gen Asaka Yasuhiko launch an assault on the Chinese city of Nanjing (Nanking).
1946
The ‘Subsequent Nuremberg trials’ begin with the ‘Doctors’ trial’, prosecuting physicians and officers alleged to be involved in Nazi human experimentation and mass murder under the guise of euthanasia.
1946
The Constituent Assembly of India meets for the first time to write the Constitution of India.
1948
The Genocide Convention is adopted.
1950
Cold War: Harry Gold is sentenced to 30 years in jail for helping Klaus Fuchs pass information about the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union. His testimony is later instrumental in the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.
1953
Red Scare: General Electric announces that all Communist employees will be discharged from the company.
1956 1960
The first episode of Corona
tion Street, the longest-running television soap opera, is broadcast in the UK.
1961
Tanganyika becomes independent from Britain.
1962
The Petrified Forest National Park is established in Arizona.
1968
Douglas Engelbart gave what became known as ‘The Mother of All Demos’, publicly debuting the computer mouse, hypertext, and the bit-mapped graphical user interface using the oN-Line System (NLS).
1973
British and Irish authorities sign the Sunningdale Agreement in an attempt to establish a power-sharing Northern Ireland Executive and a cross-border Council of Ireland.
1979
The eradication of the smallpox virus is certified, making smallpox the first of only two diseases that have been driven to extinction (rinderpest in 2011 being the other).
1988
The Michael Hughes Bridge in Sligo, Ireland, is officially opened.
1992
American troops land in Somalia.
2003
A blast in the centre of Moscow kills six people and wounds several more.
2012
A plane crash in Mexico kills seven people.
2013
At least seven are dead in a train accident in Indonesia.
2016
President Park Geun-hye of South Korea is impeached by the country’s National Assembly in response to a major political scandal.
In France, the law separating church and state is passed.
Trans-Canada Air Lines Flight 810, a Canadair North Star, crashes near Hope, British Columbia, Canada, killing all 62 people on board.