EVENTS
- 1542 – Princess Mary Stuart becomes Queen Mary I of Scotland at the age of only six days old.
- 1799 – George Washington died at Mount Vernon.
- 1819 – Alabama is admitted as the 22nd U.S. state.
- 1861 – In Britain, Prince Albert died of typhoid at Windsor Castle. He was the consort and husband of Queen Victoria of England. Following his death, the Queen went into an extended period of mourning.
- 1900 – In a key event in the development of Quantum Mechanics, Max Planck presents a theoretical derivation of his black-body radiation law.
- 1911 – Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen became the first person to reach the South Pole.
- 1918 – British women voted for the first time in a general election and were allowed to run for office.
- 1927 – Britain recognized independent Iraq and supported Iraqi admission to the League of Nations.
- 1935 – Thomas Masaryk, founder and first president of the Czechoslovak Republic, resigned and was succeeded by Edvard Benes.
- 1939 – The League of Nations expelled Soviet Russia for its aggression against Finland.
- 1947 – NASCAR is founded in Daytona Beach, Florida.
- 1958 – Soviets reach the southern pole of inaccessibility. A Pole of Inaccessibility is a location on Earth that is extremely difficult to access. In the North, it is the point in the Arctic Ocean that is farthest from land, while in the Southern Hemisphere it is the point farthest from the Southern Ocean on Antarctica. In 1958, a Soviet team led by Yevgeny Tolstikov became the first people in history to reach the Southern Pole of Inaccessibility, which is 546 miles (878 kilometers) from the geographic South Pole. Temperatures at this location averages around – 73 degree F (–58 degrees C).
- 1959 – Berry Gordy founds the Motown record label in Detroit, Michigan.
- 1961 – Tanzania joins the United Nations. Tanzania was created as a merger of Tanganyika and the Zanzibar Archipelago, both of which were under British rule until independence.
- 1962 – The Mariner II space probe sent back information from the planet Venus, the first information ever received from another planet.
- 1995 – A Bosnian peace treaty was signed in Paris by leaders from the former Yugoslavia. The treaty ended Eu2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Adam Lanza shot and killed 20 children and 6 adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.rope’s worst conflict since World War II.
BIRTHDAYS
- 1503 – Nostradamus (French Astrologer)
- 1546 – Tycho Brahe (Danish Astronomer)
- 1896 – World War II General James Doolittle (1896-1993) was born in Alameda, California (On April 18, 1942, he led a squadron of B-25 bombers launched from the aircraft carrier Hornet to conduct the first American air raid of the war against mainland Japan (He also headed the Eighth Air Force during the Normandy invasion and was awarded the Medal of Honor.
- 1946 – Patty Duke (Actress)
- 1947 – Dilma Rousseff (Brazilian politician, economist, 36th President of Brazil)
- 1963 – Cynthia Gibb (Actress)
- 1966 – Fabrizio Giovanardi (Italian race car driver)
- 1988 – Vanessa Anne Hudgens (Actress)
DEATHS
- 1799 – George Washington (American general, politician, 1st President of the United States)
- 1943 – John Harvey Kellogg (American surgeon, co-created Corn flakes)
- 1947 – Stanley Baldwin (English politician)
- 1989 – Andrei Sakharov (Russian physicist)
- 2013 – Peter O’Toole (Irish actor)