- 538 – Vitiges, king of the Ostrogoths ends his siege of Rome and retreats to Ravenna, leaving the city in the hands of the victorious Byzantine general, Belisarius.[1]
- 1622 – Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier, founders of the Society of Jesus, are canonized by the Roman Catholic Church.[2]
- 1689 – James II of England landed at Kinsale, starting the Williamite War in Ireland.[3]
- 1811 – Peninsular War: A day after a successful rearguard action, French Marshal Michel Ney once again successfully delays the pursuing Anglo-Portuguese force at the Battle of Redinha.[4]
- 1912 – The Girl Guides (later renamed the Girl Scouts of the USA) are founded in the United States.[5]
- 1913 – The future capital of Australia is officially named Canberra.[6]
- 1918 – Moscow becomes the capital of Russia again after Saint Petersburg held this status for most of the period since 1713.[7]
- 1920 – The Kapp Putsch begins when the Marinebrigade Ehrhardt is ordered to march on Berlin.[8]
- 1928 – In California, the St. Francis Dam fails; the resulting floods kill 431 people.[9]
- 1930 – Mahatma Gandhi begins the Salt March, a 200-mile march to the sea to protest the British monopoly on salt in India.[10]
- 1933 – Great Depression: Franklin D. Roosevelt addresses the nation for the first time as President of the United States. This is also the first of his “fireside chats“.[5]
- 1938 – Anschluss: German troops occupy and absorb Austria.[11]
- 1940 – Winter War: Finland signs the Moscow Peace Treaty with the Soviet Union, ceding almost all of Finnish Karelia.[12]
- 1942 – The Battle of Java ends with the surrender of the American-British-Dutch-Australian Command to the Japanese Empire in Bandung, West Java, Dutch East Indies.[13]
- 1947 – Cold War: The Truman Doctrine is proclaimed to help stem the spread of Communism.[14]
- 1950 – The Llandow air disaster kills 80 people when the aircraft they are travelling in crashes near Sigingstone, Wales. At the time this was the world’s deadliest air disaster.[15]
- 1967 – Suharto takes power from Sukarno when the People’s Consultative Assembly inaugurate him as Acting President of Indonesia.[16]
- 1968 – Mauritius achieves independence from the United Kingdom.[17]
- 1971 – The 1971 Turkish military memorandum is sent to the Süleyman Demirel government of Turkey and the government resigns.[18]
- 1992 – Mauritius becomes a republic while remaining a member of the Commonwealth of Nations.[19]
- 1993 – Several bombs explode in Mumbai, India, killing about 300 people and injuring hundreds more.[20]
- 1993 – North Korea announces that it will withdraw from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and refuses to allow inspectors access to its nuclear sites.[21]
- 1999 – Former Warsaw Pact members the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland join NATO.[22]
- 2003 – Zoran Đinđić, Prime Minister of Serbia, is assassinated in Belgrade.[23]
- 2003 – The World Health Organization officially release a global warning of outbreaks of Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).[24]
- 2004 – The President of South Korea, Roh Moo-hyun, is impeached by its National Assembly: the first such impeachment in the nation’s history.[25]
- 2009 – Financier Bernard Madoff pleads guilty to one of the largest frauds in Wall Street‘s history.[26]
- 2011 – A reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant explodes and releases radioactivity into the atmosphere a day after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.[27]
- 2014 – A gas explosion in the New York City neighborhood of East Harlem kills eight and injures 70 others.[28]
- 2019 – In the House of Commons, the revised EU Withdrawal Bill was rejected by a margin of 149 votes.[29]
-Source: wikipedia
