Interesting Facts

8th July 1949 – Celebrities Helen Keller, Dorothy Parker, Danny Kaye, Fredric March, John Garfield, Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson were named in an FBI report as Communist Party members. 1953 – The United States Supreme Court ruled that Washington, D.C. restaurants could not refuse to serve black patrons. 1965 - Ronald Biggs who was serving a 30-year prison sentence for his part in the Great Train Robbery escaped from Wandsworth prison. 1968 – James Earl Ray was arrested for the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. 1984 – Homosexuality was declared legal in the Australia state of New South Wales. 1996 - Three young children and four adults were attacked by a man with a machete at an infant school in Wolverhampton, England. 2001 – Mamoru Takuma stabbed 8 school pupils to death at Ikeda Elementary School. 2003 - Conjoined Iranian twins, Ladan Bijani and Laleh Bijani (in Persian: لادن و لاله بیژنی ), who had volunteered to go ahead with a major operation to separate the...

30th June 1860 – The 1860 Oxford evolution debate at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History took place. 1908 – The Tunguska event occured in Siberia. 1936 - Gone with the Wind was published. 1934 – The Night of the Long Knives, Adolf Hitler's violent purge of his political rivals in Germany, took place. 1953 – The first Chevrolet Corvette rolled off the assembly line in Flint, Michigan, USA. (I wonder if it was a little red one.) 1960 – Congo gained independence from Belgium. 1963 – A car bomb, intended for Mafia boss Salvatore Greco, killed seven police and military officers near Palermo. 1969 – Nigeria banned Red Cross aid to Biafra, leaving over 4 million people to face starvation. 1971 - Three Russian cosmonauts were found dead in their Soyuz 11 space capsule after it made what looked like a perfect landing in Kazakhstan. 1985 - 39 Americans being held captive by the Shia Muslim Amal militia in Lebanon were released, after almost three weeks in ...

18th June 1429 – French forces under the leadership of Joan of Arc defeated the main English army under Sir John Fastolf at the Battle of Patay. This turned the tide of the Hundred Years' War. 1767 – Samuel Wallis, an English sea captain, sighted Tahiti and is considered the first European to reach the island. 1812 - The United States declared war on on the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. 1815 – The Battle of Waterloo led to Napoleon Bonaparte abdicating the throne of France for the second and final time. 1858 – Charles Darwin received a paper from Alfred Russel Wallace that included nearly identical conclusions about evolution as Darwin's own. This prompted Darwin to publish his theory. 1873 – Susan B. Anthony was fined $100 for attempting to vote in the 1872 US presidential election. (The 19th Amendment (Amendment XIX) to the United States Constitution, which prohibits each of the states and the federal government from denying any citizen the right t...

17th June 1579 – Sir Francis Drake claimed a land he called "Nova Albion" (modern California) for England. 1631 – Mumtaz Mahal died during childbirth. Her husband, Mughal emperor Shah Jahan I, then spent more than 20 years building her tomb, the Taj Mahal. 1882 - Igor Stravinsky, the Russian composer, was born. 1885 – The Statue of Liberty arrived in New York Harbour aboard the French ship Isere. 1939 – Last public guillotining in France took place. Eugen Weidmann, a convicted murderer, was guillotined in Versailles outside the prison Saint-Pierre. 1940 – The three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania fell under the occupation of the Soviet Union. 1944 – Iceland declared independence from Denmark and became a republic. 1947 - Pan Am Airways was chartered as the world's first worldwide passenger airline. 1950 - The first documented kidney transplant took place in Chicago, on Ruth Tucker, a 44-year-old woman with polycystic kidney disease. Un...

2nd June 455 – The Vandals entered Rome, and plundered the city for two weeks. 1692 – Bridget Bishop was the first person to go to trial in the Salem witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts. 1793 – Jean-Paul Marat recited the names of 29 people to the French National Convention. Almost all of these people were guillotined, followed by 17,000 more over the course of the next year during the Reign of Terror. 1924 – U.S. President Calvin Coolidge signed the Indian Citizenship Act into law, granting citizenship to all Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the United States. 1946 – Italians voted to turn Italy from a monarchy into a Republic. After the referendum the king of Italy Umberto II di Savoia was exiled. 1953 - Queen Elizabeth II was crowned. 1966 - The United States landed a spacecraft on the Moon on its first try (four months behind the Soviet Union). 1985 - English clubs were banned from playing in Europe indefinitely, after the riot at Brussels...

29th May 1660 – Charles II was restored to the throne of Great Britain. (It was his birthday too.) 1913 – Igor Stravinsky's ballet score; The Rite of Spring premiered in Paris, France, provoking a riot. 1914 – Ocean liner RMS Empress of Ireland sank in the Gulf of St. Lawrence; 1,024 people died. 1919 – Einstein's theory of general relativity was tested (and later confirmed) by Arthur Eddington's observation of a total solar eclipse in Principe and by Andrew Crommelin in Sobral, Ceará, Brazil. 1942 – Bing Crosby, the Ken Darby Singers and the John Scott Trotter Orchestra recorded Irving Berlin's "White Christmas", the best-selling Christmas single in history. 1953 – Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay became the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest, on Tenzing Norgay's (adopted) 39th birthday. 1968 - Manchester Utd Football Club won the European Cup becoming the first English club to do so. 1972 – 26 people were killed...

4th May 1493 – Pope Alexander VI divided the New World between Spain and Portugal along the Line of Demarcation. (No one told the New World.) 1494 – Christopher Columbus landed in Jamaica. 1675 – King Charles II of England ordered the construction of the Royal Greenwich Observatory. 1814 – Emperor Napoleon I of France arrived at Portoferraio on the island of Elba to begin his exile. 1904 – Charles Stewart Rolls met Frederick Henry Royce at the Midland Hotel in Manchester, England. (The rest as they say is history.) 1912 – Italy occupied the Greek island of Rhodes. 1932 – Mobster Al Capone began serving an eleven-year prison sentence for tax evasion. 1945 – British forces liberated Neuengamme concentration camp near Hamburg. 1945 – The North Germany Army surrendered to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. 1949 – The entire Torino football team (except for one player who did not take the trip due to an injury) was killed in a plane crash at the Superga hill at the edg...

10th April 837 – Halley's Comet made its closest approach to Earth at a distance equal to 0.0342 AU (5.1 million kilometres/3.2 million miles). 1512 – James V of Scotland was born. 1606 – The Virginia Company of London was established by royal charter by James I of England with the purpose of establishing colonial settlements in North America. 1710 – The Statute of Anne, the first law regulating copyright, came into force in Great Britain. 1829 – William Booth, the English minister who founded The Salvation Army was born. 1858 – The original Big Ben, a 14.5 ton bell for the Palace of Westminster cracked during testing and was recast into the current 13.76 tonnes (30,300 lb) bell by Whitechapel Bell Foundry. 1912 – RMS Titanic set sail from Southampton, England on her maiden and only voyage. 1925 – The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald was first published. 1932 – Omar Sharif was born. 1953 – Warner Bros. premiered the first 3D film from a major American studio...

6th February 1945 - Bob Marley was born. 1952 - King George VI died in his sleep aged just 56 and Princess Elizabeth became sovereign of Great Britain. (She wasn't declared Queen until February 8, and wasn't crowned Queen Elizabeth II until June 2, 1953.) 1958 - British European Airways Flight 609 crashed on its third attempt to take off from a slush-covered runway at the Munich-Riem airport in Munich, West Germany. On board the plane was the Manchester United football team, nicknamed the Busby Babes, along with a number of supporters and journalists. Twenty-three of the 44 passengers on board the aircraft died in what was to be called The Munich Air Disaster.

Although the US National Weather Service did not start using names until 1953, for hundreds of years hurricanes in the West Indies were named after the saint's day on which they occurred. (I have written an article on this, I'll publish it in the October English Magazine.)