ON THIS DAY FEBRUARY 14
1076 Pope Gregory VII excommunicates Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV (for the 1st time) 1349 Several hundred Jews are burnt alive, and the remainder are hounded from Strasbourg.
1400 Richard II of England dies after being starved to death in captivity by his usurper, Henry Bolingbroke.
1779 Explorer Captain James Cook is killed by locals on the Island of Hawaii.
1840 Dingane, stripped of his kingship after he and his Zulu warriors are vanquished at the battle of Magongo, at the Umkuzi River, flees to Swaziland, where he is murdered. 1840 Natal is proclaimed a Voortrekker Republic, with the borders being the Umzimvubu in the south, the Black Mfolozi (including St Lucia Bay) in the north, the sea to the east. No western border is mentioned. 1852 Great Ormond St Hospital for Sick Children, the first hospital in England to provide in-patient beds specifically for children, is founded in London.
1876 Alexander Graham Bell applies for a patent for the telephone, as does Elisha Gray. The US Supreme Court eventually rules that Bell is the rightful inventor.
1900 British forces begin a fourth attempt to lift the siege of Ladysmith.
1929 Seven people – six are rivals of Al Capone’s gang – are murdered in the St Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago.
1931 The original Dracula film, starring Bela Lugosi as the titular vampire, is released. 1941 The German 5th Light Division, Rommel’s Afrika Corps, arrives in Tripoli to give backbone to the Italian-led Axis forces in North Africa.
1945 Prague is bombed, probably due to a mistake of orientation by pilots bombing Dresden.
1989 Iran’s Ruhollah Khomeini issues a fatwa against Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses.
1990 The Voyager 1 spacecraft takes the Pale Blue Dot photograph of Earth.
1994 King Goodwill Zwelithini tells President FW de Klerk he rejects South Africa’s interim constitution and is prepared to set up a Zulu kingdom.
2005 Youtube is launched by a group of college students.
2011 As a part of the Arab Spring, the Bahraini uprising begins with a ‘Day of Rage’. 2013 Olympian and paralympian Oscar Pistorius kills his girlfriend, Reeva Steenkamp, and is charged with murder. 2018 Jacob Zuma resigns as president.
| THE HISTORIAN