This date in history

[Jeff-Groves]

1920 The United States Post Office Department made an important decision. Children could no longer be sent through the mail. And that's probably why My Step-Son keeps getting returned.

[Jimbuna]

1907 Researcher George Soper publishes the results of his investigation into recent typhoid outbreaks in the New York area and announces that Mary Mallon [Typhoid Mary] is the likely source of the outbreak.

1916 Boeing Model 1 [B & W Seaplane], the 1st Boeing product, flies for the 1st time.

1917 In order to calm troubled relations with Ireland, the British grant amnesty to the Prisoners taken during the Easter Rising of 1916

1940 German troops occupy Paris as French resistance to the German invasion crumbles.

1955 The Eisenhower administration stages the first annual "Operation Alert" (OPAL) exercise, an attempt to assess the USA's preparations for a nuclear attack.

1960 Argentina complains to UN about Israeli illicit transfer of Adolf Eichmann.

1996 IRA bomb in Manchester wrecks city centre at 11.17am, injuring 200

[Jimbuna]

1779 Spain declares war on Great Britain in support of France and the USA, starting the Great Siege of Gibraltar which goes on to last 3 years, 7 months and 2 weeks.

1815 French army under Napoleon defeats Prussia in the Battle of Ligny, Napoleon's last military victory.

1922 Irish republicans are beaten in a national election; the vote is in favor of the Treaty of London, which leaves the Irish Free State as a dominion within the British Commonwealth.

1944 George Stinney, a 14-year-old African-American boy, is wrongfully executed for the murder of two white girls, becoming the youngest person ever executed in 20th-century America.

1982 Britain makes request to Argentina to arrange for return of prisoners.

2000 Israel complies with UN Security Council Resolution 425 after 22 years, which calls on Israel to completely withdraw from Lebanon. Israel withdraws from all of Lebanon, except the disputed Sheba Farms.

2015 TV personality and real estate mogul Donald Trump launches his campaign for the Republican nomination for US President at Trump Towers.

[Jimbuna]

1579 English navigator Francis Drake lands on the coast of California at Drakes Bay, names it "New Albion"

1631 Mumtaz Mahal dies during childbirth. Her husband, Mughal emperor Shah Jahan I, then spends more than 20 years building her tomb, the Taj Mahal.

1885 Statue of Liberty arrives in NYC aboard French ship `Isere'

1939 Last public guillotining in France. Eugen Weidmann, a convicted murderer, is guillotined in Versailles outside the prison Saint-Pierre.

1940 France asks Germany for terms of surrender in WW II

1940 General De Gaulle departs Bordeaux for London.

1940 World War II: sinking of the RMS Lancastria by the Luftwaffe near Saint-Nazaire, France.

1944 Hitler secretly meets with Field Marshals von Rundstedt and Rommel in Marjival, Soissons, France to assess response to Normandy Invasion.

1974 The Provisional Irish Republican Army bombs the Houses of Parliament in London, injuring 11 people and causing extensive damage.

1978 The Provisional Irish Republican Army kill an RUC officer and kidnap another near Crossmaglen, County Armagh.

1982 President of Argentina Leopoldo Galtieri resigns as commander in chief of the army and as president after leading Argentina to a disastrous defeat against the British in the Falkland Islands War.

[Jimbuna]

1812 War of 1812 begins as the US declares war against Britain.

1815 Battle of Waterloo; Napoleon Bonaparte and France defeated by British forces under Duke of Wellington and Prussian troops under Field Marshall von Blücher.

1940 General Charles de Gaulle makes his first speech on the BBC to the French people, since arriving in London, an appeal to defy Nazi occupiers - regarded as the beginning of French Resistance during WWII

1940 Winston Churchill gives his "this was their finest hour" speech to the House of Commons urging perseverance in the war after the Dunkirk evacuation and the fall of France.

1944 German submarine U-767 sunk by English Navy destroyers in the English Channel.

1945 William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw), fascist politician and Nazi propaganda broadcaster, charged with treason in England.

1972 3 members of the British Army are killed by an Irish Republican Army (IRA) bomb in a derelict house near Lurgan, County Down.

[Jimbuna]

1788 US Constitution comes into effect when New Hampshire is the 9th state to ratify it.

1854 First Victoria Cross won during the bombardment of Bomarsund in the Aland Islands during the Crimean War.

1919 The German Navy, feeling betrayed by the terms of the Versailles Treaty, scuttles most of its ships interned at Great Britain's Scapa Flow Naval base in the Orkney Islands.

1948 Lord Mountbatten resigns as Governor General of India (formerly the last Viceroy)

1992 Last day of test cricket for English star players Ian Botham and Allan Lamb.

[Jimbuna]

1633 Galileo Galilei recants his "heretical" position that the Earth orbiting the Sun was at odds with the Bible and church teaching (Vatican apologizes in Oct 1992 for how it handled the case)

1815 After his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte abdicates for the second time, in favor of his son Napoleon II

1865 The CSS Shenandoah fires the last shot of the American Civil War in the Bering Strait to indicate surrender.

1911 King George V crowned King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and all his realms and territories beyond the sea.

1939 Princess and future Queen Elizabeth meets future husband Prince Philip of Greece (Midshipman Mountbatten, RN)

1940 France surrenders to Nazi Germany, with the northern half of the country occupied and the south established as the Nazi client state Vichy France.

1941 Operation Barbarossa: Nazi Germany and its allies invade the Soviet Union during World War II, the largest military operation in history.

1943 617 Squadron (Dambusters) attends investiture at Buckingham Palace; Commanding Officer Guy Gibson awarded the Victoria Cross.

1970 Irish socialist, republican and Member of Parliament, Bernadette Devlin, loses her appeal against a 6-month prison sentence imposed for taking part in riots in Derry.

1972 The Irish Republican Army announce that it would call a ceasefire from 26 June 1972 provided that there is a "reciprocal response" from the security forces.

1975 Ulster Volunteer Force try to derail a train by planting a bomb on the railway line near County Kildare, Ireland; a civilian who tries to stop them is stabbed-to-death (his actions delay the explosion to let the train pass safely)

[Jimbuna]

930 World's oldest parliament, the Icelandic Parliament is established, the Alþingi (anglicised as Althing or Althingi)

1940 After conquering France, Adolf Hitler visits Paris and views the Eiffel Tower and the grave of Napoleon Bonaparte.

1942 Germany's latest fighter, a Focke-Wulf FW190 is captured intact when it mistakenly lands at RAF Pembrey in Wales.

1943 RAF discovers Wernher von Braun's German V1/V2 rocket development base in Peenemunde.

1945 Last organized Japanese defiance broken (Tarakan)

1951 Treacherous British diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean flee to USSR

1959 Convicted Manhattan Project spy Klaus Fuchs is released after only nine years in prison and allowed to emigrate to Dresden, East Germany, where he resumed a scientific career.

1974 First extraterrestrial message sent from Earth into space.

2016 United Kingdom votes in the Brexit referendum to leave the European Union,

[Jimbuna]

1497 John Cabot claims parts of North America (what is now Eastern Canada) for England believing he has found Asia in Newfoundland.

1812 Napoleon Bonaparte's Grand Armée numbering half a million begin their invasion of Russia by crossing the Nieman River.

1853 US President Franklin Pierce signs the Gadsden Purchase, buying 29,670 square-miles (76,800 square km) from Mexico for $10 million (now southern Arizona and New Mexico)

1917 Russian Black Sea fleet mutinies at Sebastopol.

1922 Adolf Hitler begins a month long prison sentence for paramilitary operations; he rails against the 'Jewish sell-out' of Germany to the Bolsheviks.

1930 First detection of an airplane using reflected radio waves, a precursor to radar, by US Naval Research Laboratory engineers in Anacostia, Washington, D.C.

1942 Village of Ležáky, Czechoslovakia destroyed by Nazis after Gestapo finds a radio transmitter believed to have been involved coordinating the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, 33 adults were executed by firing squad on site, and children were sent to concentration camp gas chambers, and the village was burned down and plowed under.

1948 Soviet Union blockades West Berlin by stopping access by road, rail and water.

[Rockstar]

On the afternoon of 25 June 1876, George Armstrong Custer led his 7th Cavalry into a disastrous engagement against the combined forces of the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes on the sun-baked plains of what is today southern Montana. The clash is alternatively referred to as the Battle of the Little Bighorn, the Battle of the Greasy Grass, or Custer’s Last Stand.

[Jimbuna]

1483 The House of Lords and Commons declares King Edward V of England as illegitimate based on his parent's alleged bigamous marriage.

1630 Fork introduced to American dining by Governor Winthrop.

1788 Virginia becomes 10th state to ratify US constitution.

1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn: US 7th Cavalry under Brevet Major General George Armstrong Custer wiped out by Sioux and Cheyenne warriors led by Chiefs Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull in what has become famously known as "Custer's Last Stand"

1942 British RAF stages a 1,000 bomb raid on Bremen, Germany.

1942 Major General Dwight Eisenhower appointed commander of US forces in Europe.

1945 Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo announce fall of Okinawa.

1947 1st version of Anne Frank's diary "Het Achterhuis" published in The Netherlands.

1950 North Korea invades South Korea, beginning the Korean War.

[Jimbuna]

1857 The first 62 recipients are awarded the Victoria Cross for valour in the Crimean war by Queen Victoria.

1917 First US troops arrive in France during World War I

1918 The Australian steamer Wimmera is sunk by a mine laid north of Cape Maria van Diemen in 1917 by the German raider Wolf; 26 of its 151 passengers and crew were killed.

1945 The United Nations Charter is signed by 50 nations in San Francisco.

1948 US begin airlift “Operation Vittles” to West Berlin.

1959 Queen Elizabeth II and US President Dwight D. Eisenhower open the St. Lawrence Seaway, allowing oceangoing vessels to travel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes of North America.

1963 US President John F. Kennedy gives his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" (intended to mean "I am a Berliner", but may actually mean "I am a doughnut") speech in West Berlin.

1968 10-year-old English girl Mary Bell strangles four-year-old Martin Brown in Newcastle-upon-Tyne (later convicted of manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility)

1970 Two young girls die in a premature explosion in Derry after their father, a member of the Irish Republican Army, was making an incendiary device, presumably for use against the British Army.

1972 The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) kill two British Army soldiers in separate attacks during the day and at midnight begins a "bi-lateral truce"

1977 Elvis Presley appears in concert at Market Square Arena in Indianapolis, Indiana; unknowingly the last performance of his career.

1977 The Yorkshire Ripper kills 16-year-old shop assistant Jayne MacDonald in Leeds, changing public perception of the killer as she was the first victim who was not a prostitute.

[Aktungbby]

Originally Posted by Jimbuna

1963 US President John F. Kennedy gives his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" (intended to mean "I am a Berliner", but may actually mean "I am a doughnut") speech in West Berlin.

...ironic in retrospect; considering that 5 months on! he'd acquire a few holes in himself! I refraind from naming my daughter Patsy out of respect for poor Lee Harvey Oswald.

[Jimbuna]

1743 War of the Austrian Succession: King George II of Britain personally leads Allied troops to victory in the Battle of Dettingen in Bavaria. The last time a British monarch commanded troops in the field.

1923 Capt. Lowell H. Smith and Lt. John P. Richter perform the first ever aerial refueling in a DH-4B biplane.

1929 German President Paul von Hindenburg refuses to pay the German reparation debt of WWI

1942 FBI captures 8 Nazi saboteurs from a sub off NY's Long Island.

1942 PQ-17 convoy leaves Iceland for Archangelsk.

1950 North Korean troops reach Seoul, causing the UN to ask member states to aid South Korea. Harry Truman orders the US Air Force and Navy into the Korean conflict.

1954 First nuclear power station opens, in Obninsk near Moscow, Russia.

[Jimbuna]

1776 Final draft of Declaration of Independence submitted to Continental Congress.

1838 Coronation of Queen Victoria, aged 19, during a five-hour ceremony at Westminster Abbey, London.

1880 Australian bushranger Ned Kelly captured at Glenrowan.

1914 Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria and his wife Sophie are assassinated by Bosnian-Serb assassin Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo, setting off a chain of alliances and events that lead to World War I

1919 Treaty of Versailles is signed in France, ending World War I and establishing the League of Nations.

1948 British begin airlift “Operation Plainfare” to West Berlin.

1973 New Zealand ship HMNZS Otago sails for Mururoa nuclear test zone after France’s refusal to accept an International Court of Justice injunction against its atmospheric nuclear testing.