EVENTS
- 1520 – Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan passed through the strait (of Magellan) located at the southern tip of South America, thus crossing from the Atlantic Ocean into the Pacific.
- 1582 – Famed playwright, William Shakespeare, and Anne Hathaway are married.
- 1821 – Panama declared itself independent from Spain and joined the fledgling nation of Gran Colombia.
- 1905 – Irish nationalist Arthur Griffith founds Sinn Fein as a political party whose aim is the independence of Ireland.
- 1919 – Lady Astor becomes the first female member of the UK parliament.
- 1934 – FBI agents killed bank robber George “Baby Face” Nelson near Barrington, Illinois.
- 1942 – Fire erupted inside the Coconut Grove nightclub in Boston killing nearly 500 persons who had become trapped inside.
- 1943 – The Teheran Conference began, attended by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet Premier Josef Stalin. Among the major topics discussed, a second front in Western Europe, resulting in D-Day, the seaborne invasion of Normandy in northern France on June 6, 1944.
- 1964 – NASA launches Mariner 4. The first spacecraft to make a flyby of Mars, the spacecraft was the first one to send images of a planet back to Earth.
- 1967 – First pulsar observed. Graduate student Jocelyn Bell and her advisor Antony Hewish at Cambridge University were the first people to observe and discover pulsars. Pulsars are rapidly spinning neutron magnetized stars that emit radiation.
- 1975 – East Timor independence. East Timor declared its independence from Portugal
- 1979 – Billy Smith becomes the first goalie in NHL history to score a goal in a game.
- 1991 – South Ossetia declares independence. The disputed region of the country of Georgia calls itself the Republic of South Ossetia. The declaration of independence was not recognized by Georgia and was followed by the South Ossetia War. Only a few countries, including Russia and Venezuela, recognize it as a sovereign country.
BIRTHDAYS
- 1118 – Manuel I Komnenos (Byzantine emperor)
- 1489 – Margaret Tudor (English wife of James IV of Scotland)
- 1628 – British cleric John Bunyan (1628-1688) was born in Elstow, Bedfordshire (He wrote A Pilgrim’s Progress, a religious allegory of the human soul.
- 1757 – William Blake (English Poet)
- 1820 – German socialist Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) was born in Barmen, Wuppertal, Germany (He was an associate of Karl Marx and edited the second and third volumes of Marx’s Das Kapital.
- 1943 – Randy Newman (Composer – Disney’s ‘Toy Story’ and more)
- 1949 – Paul Shaffer (Bandleader for David Letterman)
- 1959 – Judd Nelson (Actor)
- 1950 – Ed Harris (Actor)
- 1962 – Jon Stewart (American comedian, actor, television host)
- 1988 – Scarlett Pomers (Actress)
DEATHS
- 1680 – Gian Lorenzo Bernini (Italian sculptor, painter)
- 1859 – Washington Irving (American historian, author)
- 1954 – Enrico Fermi (Italian physicist, Nobel Prize laureate)
- 1968 – Enid Blyton (English author)
- 2010 – Leslie Nielsen (Canadian/American actor)