Today in History

Today in History

1512 The laws of Burgos give New World natives legal protection against abuse and authorize Negro slavery.

1831 HMS Beagle, with Charles Darwin on board, departs from Plymouth. It will eventually visit the Galapagos Islands where Darwin will form his theories on evolution.

1862 Union General William Rosecrans‘ army begins moving slowly toward Murfreesboro, Tennessee, from Nashville.

1913 Charles Moyer, president of the Miners Union, is shot in the back and dragged through the streets of Chicago.

1915 In Ohio, iron and steel workers go on strike for an eight-hour day and higher wages.

1932 Radio City Music Hall opens.

1933 osef Stalin calls tensions with Japan a grave danger.

1939 A series of vicious earthquakes takes 11,000 lives in Turkey.

1941 Japanese bombers attack Manila, despite its claim as an open city.

1944 General George S. Patton’s Third Army, spearheaded by the 4th Armored Division, relieves the surrounded city of Bastogne in Belgium.

1945 The International Monetary Fund and the Bank for Reconstruction and Development are created.

1947 The new Italian constitution is promulgated in Rome.

1950 The United States and Spain resume relations for the first time since the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.

1956 Segregation on buses in Tallahassee, Florida, is outlawed.

1968 The United States agrees to sell F-4 Phantom jets to Israel.

1979 President Hafizullah Amin of Afghanistan is ousted and murdered in a coup backed by the Soviet Union, beginning a war that will last more than 10 years.

1983 President Reagan takes all responsibility for the lack of security in Beirut that allowed a terrorist on a suicide mission to kill 241 Marines.

1984 Four Polish officers are tried for the slaying of Reverend Jerzy Popieluszko.

1985 Palestinian guerrillas kill 18 people at airports in Rome and Vienna.

1996 Taliban forces retake strategic Bagram Airfield during the Afghan civil war.

2001 China receives permanent normal trade relations with the US.

2004 Radiation reaches Earth from the brightest extrasolar event ever witnessed, an explosion of magnetar SGR 1806-20.

2007 Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto assassinated.

2007 After Mwai Kibaki is declared the winner of Kenya’s presidential elections, rioting begins in Mombasa, precipitating an economic, humanitarian and political crisis.

Born

1571 Johannes Kepler, German astronomer and mathematician.

1822 Louis Pasteur, French chemist and microbiologist.

1829 Hinton Helper, southern abolitionist who wrote The Impending Crisis.

1901 Marlene Dietrich, German-born singer and actress.

1919 Major General Charles Sweeney, the pilot of Bocks Car, the B-29 that dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan.

1943 Cokie Roberts, American broadcast journalist.

1948 Gerard Depardieu, one of the most prolific character actors in film history; won two Cesar awards from France’s Academie des arts et techniques du cinema and a Golden Globe (Green Card, Cyrano de Bergerac).

1962 Bill Self, college men’s basketball coach; named the National Coach of the Year in 2000, 2009 and 2011 by The Sporting News and the Associated Press National Coach of the Year in 2009.

1971 Savannah Guthrie, journalist; co-host of NBC’s The Today Show.

1975 Heather O’Rourke, child actress discovered at age 5 by Stephen Spielberg; she died at age 12 (Poltergeist film series).

History