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Today in History
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16th
February |
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1512 Battle
at Valeggio: French troops beat Venetianen |
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1559
Pope Paul IV calls for deposition of sovereigns supporting heresy |
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1641
English king Charles I accept Triennial Act |
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1655 Dutch
Grand Pensionary advisor Johan de Witt marries Wendela Bicker |
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1666
Netherlands & Brandenburg sign treaty |
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1677
Earl of Shaftesbury arrested/confined in London Tower |
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1740
Giambattista Bodoni, Saluzzo Italy, printer/typeface designer (Bodoni) was born |
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1742
Earl of Wilmington becomes British premier |
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1804
The U.S. frigate Philadelphia, held captive by Barbary pirates at Tripoli, was destroyed
by an American party led by Stephen Decatur, thus denying its use by the Tripolitans. |
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1808
France invaded Spain in the Peninsular War. |
Heinrich Barth |
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1821
Heinrich Barth, Hamburg Germany, geographer/explorer (Central Africa) was born |
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1824
Athenaeum founded |
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1832
HMS Beagle/Charles Darwin reaches St-Pauls (1øN, 29øW) |
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1840
American Charles Wilkes discovers Shackleton Ice Shelf, Antarctica |
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1846
Battle of Sobraon ends 1st Sikh War in India |
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1862
In the American Civil war, Fort Donelson was surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant by the
Confederates. |
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1878 Silver
dollar became US legal tender |
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1905 1st
US Esperanto club organizes in Boston |
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1909 Serbia
mobilizes against Austria-Hungary |
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1916 Russian
troops conquer Erzurum Armenia |
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1917
1st synagogue in 425 years opens in Madrid |
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1918
Lithuania declares independence from Russia & Germany (National Day) |
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1923 Howard
Carter finds Pharoah Tutankhamen |
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1923
The Allied Powers Ambassadors' Conference decided to place Memelland, an area on the
Baltic Sea, under Lithuanian control. |
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1931
Extreme right wing Svinhufvud becomes president of Finland |
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1933 England
regains the Ashes, thanks to bodyline tactics |
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1933
Fearing threats from Germany, the Little Entente -- a mutual defense agreement between
Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia -- was reorganised, creating a permanent council
that met three times a year to direct a common policy. |
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1936 The
Popular Front won the general election in Spain; Manuel Azana became premier and
reestablished the constitution of 1931. |
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1937
Nylon was first developed by Dr. Wallace Carothers and his U.S. research team. |
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1942 German
submarines attack Aruba oil refinery |
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1943
British premier Winston Churchill gets pneumonia |
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1943 Red
army conquers Kharkov |
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1943
Withdrawing Africa Corps reaches Mareth-line in North-Africa |
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1944
The Japanese naval base at Truk, Caroline Islands, was bombed by Allied aircraft
destroying 201 planes. |
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1945
Venezuela declared war on Germany and Japan. |
Charles Wilkes |
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1948 Miranda,
famous moon of Uranus, photographed for 1st time |
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1956 Britain
abolishes death penalty |
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1959
Fidel Castro named himself Cuba's premier after overthrowing Batista |
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1959
Fidel Castro was sworn in as prime minister of Cuba after leading a guerrilla campaign
that ousted right-wing dictator Fulgencio Batista on January 1. |
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1960
US nuclear submarine USS Triton set off on underwater round-world trip |
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1961
China uses it's 1st nuclear reactor |
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1963
C & A Building in Amsterdam burns down |
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1978 1st
Computer Bulletin Board System (Ward & Randy's CBBS, Chicago) |
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1979
USSR performs nuclear test at Eastern Kazakh/Semipalitinsk USSR |
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1982
Agatha Barbara elected as 1st female president of Malta |
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1984 Iran
said it had broken through Iraqi defenses at the start of what Tehran Radio described as a
"massive offensive" and claimed to have killed or wounded 1,200 Iraqi soldiers
in the first 11 hours of fighting. |
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1986
Mario Soares (Socialist) elected Portugal's 1st civilian pres |
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1987
The trial of John Demjanjuk, accused of being "Ivan the Terrible" of the
Treblinka death camp in World War II, began in Israel. |
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1989 Egypt,
Iraq, Jordan & North Yemen form common market |
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1991
Enrique Bermudez, a former leader of the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, was assassinated in
Managua. |
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1994
6.5 earthquake strikes SE Sumatra, kills 200 |
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1994
Premier Alfonso Bustamente ends govt in Peru |
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1994
A Jerusalem court found former heads of Israel's top four banks guilty of fraud in a 1983
bank shares scandal that shook the country and cost the government $9 billion. |
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