ON THIS DAY
12 000 Jews are massacred in Narol Podolia, Ukraine.
Jan van Riebeeck’s wife, Maria, dies of smallpox in Malacca.
US abolitionist John Brown is found guilty of murder, conspiring with slaves to revolt against Virginia, and is sentenced to be hanged.
Verney Cameron reaches Benguela in Angola, from Africa’s east coast, the first European to cross equatorial Africa.
The Boers begin their 118-day siege of Ladysmith during the Second AngloBoer War.
The Balfour Declaration proclaims British support for the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.
Ras (Duke) Tafari is crowned as Emperor Haile Selassie in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He is the 225th emperor of the Solomonic Dynasty.
The BBC Television Service, the world’s first, begins.
The Nazis begin gassing inmates at Auschwitz.
In California, designer Howard Hughes pilots the only flight of the Hughes H-4 Hercules (“Spruce Goose”), the largest fixed-wing aircraft ever.
Matthews “Loop-en-Val” Motshwareteu, one of South Africa’s greatest middle-and long-distance athletes, is born in Soweto. He died in November 2001 at the age of 43 after being shot in a robbery.
Penguin Books is found not guilty of obscenity in a trial regarding DH Lawrence’s novel,
More than 1 000 Russians die in a fire in Salung tunnel, Afghanistan.
The Morris worm, the first internetdistributed computer worm to gain mainstream media attention launched from MIT, strikes Pentagon, SDI research laboratory and six universities.
A river of fire ignited by an oil tank explosion surges through a village in Egypt, killing more than 410 people.
Gunmen assassinate Prince Cyril Zulu, the mayor-designate of Durban.
60 people are killed and 110 injured by a suicide bombing in Lahore, Pakistan. | The Historian