ON THIS DAY

637 Arab-Byzantine wars: Antioch surrenders to the Rashidun Caliphate after the Battle of the Iron Bridge.

758 The Chinese city of Guangzhou, on the Pearl River, is sacked by Arab and Persian pirates.

1270 The Eighth Crusade ends by an agreement between Charles I and the Hafsid dynasty of Tunis.

1772 Captain Cook arrives in Cape Town with his ship Resolution.

Ndebele king Lobengula grants Cecil Rhodes Mashonaland for £100 a month.

1899 The Boers defeat the British at the Battle of Ladysmith, leading to the Siege of Ladysmith.

1899 In the Anglo-Boer War Battle of Modderspruit, Commandant General Piet Joubert causes the British to fall back. He is urged to order a pursuit, but refuses on religious grounds, one of the fatal mistakes during the war.

1831 Nat Turner is arrested for leading the bloodiest slave rebellion in US history. 1925 John Logie Baird creates the first television transmitter.

1938 A radio broadcast of HG Wells’s

The War of the Worlds, narrated by Orson Welles, causes mass panic after listeners become convinced that earth is under attack by aliens.

1944 Jewish diarist of the Holocaust, Anne Frank is deported from Auschwitz to Belsen, where she dies of illness shortly before the war’s end.

1952 Clarence Birdseye sells first frozen peas.

1961 The USSR detonates the Tsar Bomba, a 58 megaton hydrogen bomb – the most powerful explosive device ever detonated.

1969 President Jomo Kenyatta bans the Kenya Peoples Union and arrests its leader, Oginga Odinga.

1974 The Rumble in the Jungle boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman takes place in Zaire. 1974 The Texas Chain Saw Massacre horror film premieres in Los Angeles. 1996 A judge jails former state assassin Eugene de Kock for more than 200 years, describing him as a chilling and revolting agent for apartheid.

2017 Actor Kevin Spacey issues an apology after actor Anthony Rapp accuses him of inappropriate sexual behaviour when he was 14. | The Historian