Today in History
21 January
|
||
|
||
21 January |
||
| 1077 German King Heinrich IV petitions Pope Gregory VII for forgiveness | ||
| 1189 Philip II, Henry II & Richard Lion hearted initiate 3rd Crusade | ||
| 1276 Pierre de Tarantaise elected Pope Innocence V | ||
| 1324 Zen Buddhist religious debate between Tendai & Shingon | ||
| 1337 Charles V, the Wise, king of France (1364-80) was born | ||
| 1522 Head inquisitor Adrian Florisz Boeyens elected pope | ||
| 1542 Parliament passes bill of attainder against Queen Katherine Howard | ||
| 1604 Tsar Ivan IV defeats False Dmitri, who claims to be the true tsar | ||
| 1732 Russia & Persia sign Treaty of Riascha | ||
| 1771 Arnold A Buyskes, Dutch vice-admiral/colonial director was born | ||
| 1781 In America, the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Continental Government appointed the first consular officer. Thomas Barclay took up his post as vice-consul in Paris at a salary of $1,000. | ||
| 1793 King Louis XVI of France was guillotined for treason. He had ruled since 1774 and had remained king for three years after the Revolution of 1789. | ||
| 1793 Prussia & Russia sign partition treaty (Poland divided) | ||
| 1799 Edward Jenner's smallpox vaccination is introduced | ||
| 1813 John C Fremont, [Pathfinder], map maker/explorer was born | ||
| 1818 Keats writes his poem "On a Lock of Milton's Hair" | ||
| 1821 Paramaribo Suriname catches fire, 4 die | ||
| 1824 Ashantees defeat British at Accra, West Africa | ||
| 1840 Sophia Louisa Jex-Blake, pioneer English woman physician was born | ||
| 1846 1st edition of Charles Dickens' "Daily News" | ||
| 1853 Envelope-folding machine patented by Russell Hawes, Worcester, Mass | ||
| 1863 City of Dublin leases part of Cattle Market for 100,000 years | ||
| 1867 Maxime Weygard, French general/gov-gen (Algeria) was born | ||
| 1885 Umberto Nobile, Italian general was born | ||
| 1899 Lord Kitchener of Britain was appointed governor-general of Sudan. | ||
| 1901 Elisha Gray, U.S. inventor who contested the first patent for the telephone with Alexander Graham Bell, died. | ||
| 1903 "Wizard of Oz," premieres in NYC | ||
| 1903 Harry Houdini escapes police station Halvemaansteeg in Amsterdam | ||
| 1906 Fred Fehl, Austrian/US Broadway photographer was born | ||
| 1910 British-Russian military intervention in Persia | ||
| 1911 The first Monte Carlo motor rally began. | ||
| 1912 Konrad Bloch, Germany, biochemist (studied cholesterol-Nobel 1964) was born | ||
| 1913 Aristide Briand forms French governament | ||
| 1915 Kiwanis International founded in Detroit | ||
| 1919 Sinn Fein proclaims parliament of Free Ireland | ||
| 1924 Telly Savalas, Garden City NJ, actor (Acapulco, Kojak) was born | ||
| 1924 Soviet leader Lenin, who led the Bolsheviks to victory in the 1917 October Revolution, died of a brain hemmorrhage. | ||
| 1926 Belgian parliament accepts Locarno treaties | ||
| 1926 Franco Evangelisti, Italian composer was born | ||
| 1927 In the United States, act three of Gounod's opera "Faust" became the first opera to be broadcast over a national network. It was broadcast from the Chicago Civic Opera. | ||
| 1932 USSR & Finland stop non-attack treaty | ||
| 1932 Lytton Giles Strachey, British biographer, critic and member of the Bloomsbury Group, died. | ||
| 1936 In Britain, King Edward VIII was proclaimed king following the death of his father, King George V. He remained king until December 1936 when he abdicated and was succeeded by George VI. | ||
| 1940 Foreign correspondents in Netherlands under censorship | ||
| 1941 1st anti-Jewish measures in Bulgaria | ||
| 1941 Australia & Britain attack Tobruk Libya | ||
| 1941 British communist newspaper "Daily Worker" banned | ||
| 1942 Japanese air raid on Rabaul New Britain | ||
| 1942 Tito's partisans occupy Foca | ||
| 1942 German forces under Erwin Rommel launched a counter-offensive in North Africa. Caught by surprise, the British were forced into a retreat across the desert. | ||
| 1943 Soviet forces reconquer Gumrak airport near Stalingrad | ||
| 1943 Soviet forces reconquer Worosjilowsk | ||
| 1944 447 German bombers attack London | ||
| 1944 649 British bombers attack Magdeburg | ||
| 1945 British troops land on Ramree, near coast of Burma | ||
| 1950 George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair), British essayist and novelist, notably of "Animal Farm" and Nineteen Eighty-four," died. | ||
| 1952 Nehru's Congress party wins general election in India | ||
| 1953 John Foster Dulles appointed as Secretary of State | ||
| 1954 The USS Nautilus, the first nuclear-powered submarine, was launched. | ||
| 1959 Cecil Blount de Mille, U.S. film director and screenwriter, died; his reputation was based on vast film spectaculars such as "The Ten Commandments." | ||
| 1961 Portuguese rebels seize cruise ship Santa Maria | ||
| 1962 JFK arrives in Uruguay | ||
| 1964 Carl T Rowan named director of US Information Agency | ||
| 1965 Hassan Ali Mansur, prime minister of Persia, was assassinated allegedly by the extremist religious group Fidayan-i Islam. Abbas Huveida was appointed prime minister on 27 January. | ||
| 1970 Panama Boeing 747 1st flight NY-London | ||
| 1972 Belgium govt of Eyskens-Cools forms | ||
| 1972 Manipur, Meghalaya & Tripura become separate states of Indian union | ||
| 1972 Mizoram, formerly part of Assam, creates an Indian union territory | ||
| 1976 Two Concorde aircraft entered service simultaneously with flights from London to Bahrain and Paris to Rio de Janeiro. They were the first scheduled passenger services by supersonic aircraft. | ||
| 1976 Western newspapers, including Britain's Financial Times and New York Times, went on sale in the Soviet Union for the first time. | ||
| 1977 Italy legalizes abortion | ||
| 1980 An Iran Air Boeing 727 flying from Mashad to Tehran crashed on a mountainside in fog, killing all 128 on board. | ||
| 1983 Bollingen Prize for poetry awarded to Anthony E Hecht | ||
| 1984 Britain's first test-tube triplets, a girl and two boys, were born to a couple in London. | ||
| 1985 Bomb attack on Borobudur temple in Java | ||
| 1986 Bomb attack in East-Beirut, 27 killed | ||
| 1988 US accept immigration of 30,000 US-Vietnamese children | ||
| 1990 The East German Communist party expelled former leader Egon Krenz and 13 other politburo members. | ||
| 1991 CBS News correspondant Bob Simon captured by Iraqis in Persian Gulf | ||
| 1993 Nigerian singer Fela Kuti arrested on suspicion of murder | ||
| 1994 Belgian Deputy Prime Minister Guy Coeme and two other leading Socialist politicians resigned over a bribery scandal. | ||
| 1996 Mufti Fatkhulla Sharipov, the pro-Moscow Muslim spiritual leader of Tajikistan, was shot dead at his home west of Dushanbe. | ||
| 1997 German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Czech Prime Minister Vaclav Klaus signed a declaration cementing post-war reconciliation between Germany and the Czech Republic. | ||
| 1997 "Colonel" Tom Parker, the manager who helped guide Elvis Presley's rise from young hopeful to the king of rock 'n' roll, died. | ||
| 1998 Pope John Paul II visits Cuba | ||