March 25th:

31- 1st Easter, according to calendar-maker Dionysius Exiguus

1807- British Parliament abolishes slave trade throughout the British Empire; penalty of £120 per slave introduced for ship captains

1669- Mount Etna in Sicily erupts, destroying Nicolosi, killing 20,000

1776- Continental Congress authorizes a medal for George Washington

1811- Percy Bysshe Shelley is expelled from the University of Oxford for his publication of the pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism

1851- Yosemite Valley discovery made public by Major James D. Savage and Captain John Boling after being shown by Indian guides in California

1863- 1st US Army Medal of Honor awarded to six army soldiers by US Secretary of War Edwin Stanton in Washington

1863- Skirmish at Brentwood, Tennessee/ 1864- Battle of Paducah, Kentucky (Forrest’s raid)/ 1865- Battle of Bluff Spring, Florida/ 1865- Battle of Petersburg: In an unsuccessful counter attack, Confederate forces attack Fort Stedman/ 1865- Battle of Mobile, Alabama (Spanish Fort, Fort Morgan, Fort Blakely)

1865- SS General Lyon at Cape Hatteras catches fire & sinks, killing 400

1882- 1st demonstration of pancake making, held at a department store in NYC

1898- Writer O. Henry sentenced to 5 years in prison for embezzling $854 from a bank reportedly to pay for his sick wife’s medical bills. Goes on to write many classics while in jail including “Whistling Dick’s Christmas Stocking”.

1900- US Socialist Party forms in Indianapolis

My source and more facts at On This Day

March 18th:

1965- Cosmonaut Alexey Leonov, leaving his spacecraft Voskhod 2 for 12 minutes, becomes the first person to walk in space.

1940- Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler meet at Brenner Pass where the Italian dictator agrees he will, in due course, join Germany’s impending war effort in the west.

1662- First public bus service begins, promoted by Blaise Pascal, operates in Paris as the “Carosses a Cinq Sous” until 1675

1766- Britain repeals the Stamp Act, which had caused outrage in colonial America and helped lead to the American Revolution

1793- The first republican state in Germany, the Republic of Mainz, is declared by Andreas Joseph Hofmann.

1818- US Congress approves 1st pensions for government service.

1865- Congress of Confederate States of American adjourns for last time.

1877- US President Rutherford B. Hayes appoints Frederick Douglass marshal of Washington, D.C.

1895- 200 African Americans leave Savannah, Georgia for Liberia.

1920- Greece adopts the Gregorian calendar.

1922- British magistrates in India sentence Mahatma Gandhi to 6 years imprisonment for disobedience.

1942- 2 black players, Jackie Robinson & Nate Moreland, request a tryout with the Chicago White Sox, they are allowed to work out.

My source and more facts at On This Day

March 11th:

2011- 9.0 magnitude earthquake strikes 130 km (80 miles) east of Sendai, Japan, triggering a tsunami killing thousands of people and causing the second worst nuclear accident in history at Fukushima nuclear plant

2020- COVID-19 declared a pandemic by the head of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, with 121,564 cases worldwide and 4,373 deaths

1779- US Army Corps of Engineers established (1st time)

1791- Samuel Mulliken is 1st to obtain more than one US patent

1823- 1st normal school in US opens, Concord Academy, Concord, Vermont

1850- Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania opens, 2nd female medical school in the US

1872- The Meiji Japanese government officially annexes the Ryukyu Kingdom into what would become the Okinawa prefecture

1892- 1st public basketball game (Springfield, Massachusetts)

1918- US Army mess cook Private Albert Gitchell of Fort Riley, Kansas becomes the first documented case of Spanish flu; start of worldwide pandemic killing 50-100 million

1967- Pink Floyd releases 1st single “Arnold Layne”

1968- Otis Redding is the first person in the US to posthumously receive gold record for his single “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay”

1986- NFL adopts instant replay rule

My source and more facts at On This Day

February 11th:

1990- Nelson Mandela released after 27 years imprisonment in South Africa

1975- Margaret Thatcher defeats Edward Heath for leadership of the British Conservative Party

1543- Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and English King Henry VIII sign anti-French covenant

1766- Stamp Act declared unconstitutional in Virginia

1790- Society of Friends petitions Congress for abolition of slavery

1794- 1st session of US Senate open to the public

1814- Norway’s independence proclaimed

1837- American Physiological Society organizes in Boston

1878- 1st weekly weather report published in UK

1938- World’s first science fiction TV program – a broadcast of the play R.U.R. by Karel Čapek

1942- “Archie” comic book debuts

1951- Kwame Nkrumah wins 1st parliamentary election in the Gold Coast (Ghana)

My source and more facts at On This Day

January 28th:

1813- Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” is published by Thomas Egerton in the United Kingdom

1807- London’s Pall Mall is 1st street lit by gaslight

1547- 9-year-old Edward VI succeeds Henry VIII as King of England

1865- Confederate President Jefferson Davis names 3 peace commissioners

1878- Yale Daily News published, 1st college daily newspaper

1887- Work begins on the Eiffel Tower in Paris

1915- US President Woodrow Wilson refuses to prohibit immigration of illiterates

1932- 1st US state unemployment insurance act enacted (Wisconsin)

1949- NY Giants sign their 1st black players, Monte Irvin & Ford Smith

1953- WJTV TV channel 12 in Jackson, MS (CBS) begins broadcasting

1956- Elvis Presley’s 1st appearance on national TV on the Dorsey Brothers’s “Stage Show”

1962- Johanne Relleke gets stung by bees 2,443 times in Rhodesia & survives

My source and more facts at On This Day

January 21st:

2008- Black Monday in worldwide stock markets. FTSE 100 had its biggest ever one-day points fall, European stocks closed with their worst result since 9/11, and Asian stocks drop as much as 15%.

1789- 1st American novel, WH Brown’s “Power of Sympathy” is published

1542- English Parliament passes bill of attainder against Queen Katherine Howard

1677- 1st medical publication in America (pamphlet on smallpox), published in Boston

1846- 1st edition of Charles Dickens’ newspaper “The Daily News”

1903- Harry Houdini escapes from Halvemaansteeg police station in Amsterdam

1908- “Sullivan Ordinance” is passed in NYC, making it illegal for a woman to smoke in public places. It was vetoed 2 weeks later by mayor George B. McClellan Jr.

1921- British crime writer Agatha Christie publishes her first novel “The Mysterious Affair at Styles” introducing the character Hercule Poirot

1927- 1st national opera broadcast from a US opera house (Faust, Chicago)

1938- Dutch government starts obligatory unemployment insurance

1962- Snow falls in San Francisco

1977- US President Jimmy Carter pardons almost all Vietnam War draft evaders

My source and more facts at On This Day

January 7th:

1953- US President Harry Truman announces American development of the hydrogen bomb

1999- President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial begins in the US Senate after the House voted to impeach him for lying about his affair with Monica Lewinsky

1610- Galileo Galilei discovers the first three moons of Jupiter: Io, Europa & Ganymede

1611- Trial of Hungarian aristocrat Elizabeth Báthory for killing and torturing hundreds of young women, later sentenced to house arrest for the rest of her life

1782- 1st US commercial bank, Bank of North America, opens in Philadelphia

1785- 1st balloon flight across English Channel by Jean Pierre Blanchard and John Jeffries

1890- African American inventor William Purvis receives a patent for the fountain pen

1927- Commercial transatlantic telephone service inaugurated between New York & London

1929- “Tarzan”, one of the 1st adventure comic strips, 1st appears

1950- Mental health wing of Mercy Hospital burns, kills 41 in Davenport, Iowa

1954- Georgetown-IBM experiment, 1st public demonstration of a machine translation system, is held at IBM’s head office in New York

1955- Marian Anderson becomes the 1st African American to perform with the New York Metropolitan Opera

My source and more facts at On This Day

December 17th:

1903- The Wright brothers make the 1st sustained motorized aircraft flight at 10:35 AM, piloted by Orville Wright at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina

1986- Mrs Davina Thompson makes medical history by having the 1st heart, lung & liver transplant at Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, England

1538- Pope Paul II excommunicates King Henry VIII of England

1791- NYC traffic regulation creates 1st 1-way street

1798- 1st impeachment trial against a US senator (William Blount, Tennessee) begins

1821- Kentucky abolishes debtors’ prisons

1843- Henry Cole, founder of London’s V&A Museum, commissions printing of the 1st Christmas card

1852- 1st Hawaiian cavalry organized

1862- General Ulysses S. Grant issues order #11, expelling Jews from Tennessee

1914- Jews are expelled from Tel Aviv by Turkish authorities

1919- Austrian parliament approves 8-hour working day

1943- Transport 63 departs with French Jews to nazi-Germany

My source and more facts at On This Day

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December 10th:

1799- Metric system first adopted in France

1901- First Nobel Peace Prizes awarded to Red Cross founder Jean Henri Dunant and peace activist Frederic Passy

1690- Massachusetts Bay becomes first American colonial government to issue paper money

1817- Mississippi admitted as 20th state of the Union

1864- General Sherman’s armies reach Savannah & 12 day siege begins

1869- Women suffrage (right to vote) granted in Wyoming Territory (US 1st)

1884- “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain is first published in the UK and Canada (US Feb 1885, due to printing error)

1901- First Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Wilhelm Röntgen for his discovery of X-rays

1903- Nobel Prize for physics awarded to Pierre and Marie Curie for their study of spontaneous radiation

1904- Ivan Pavlov awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for work on the physiology of digestion, first Russian to win a Nobel Prize

1906- US President Theodore Roosevelt is the 1st American awarded the Nobel Peace Prize

1909- Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf is the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature

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December 3rd:

1967- 1st human heart transplant performed in South Africa by Dr Christiaan Barnard on Louis Washkansky

1989- Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and US President George H. W. Bush, declare the Cold War over

1639- 1st annulment by court decree passes

1775- First official US flag raised (Grand Union Flag) aboard naval vessel USS Alfred

1828- Andrew Jackson elected 7th US President

1833- Oberlin College in Ohio, the first truly coeducational college, opens

1847- Frederick Douglass publishes first issue of his newspaper “North Star”

1863- Confederate General James Longstreet abandons his siege at Knoxville, TN

1868- 1st blacks on US trial jury appointed for Jefferson Davis trial

1920- Turkey & Armenia agree to peace treaty

1926- Detective novelist Agatha Christie mysteriously disappears for 11 days

1931- Alka Seltzer goes on sale

My source and more facts at On This Day

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