1248 – An overnight landslide on the north side of Mont Granier (in France), one of the largest historical rockslope failures ever recorded in Europe, destroyed five villages.
1429 – Hundred Years’ War: Joan of Arc unsuccessfully besieged La Charité.
1835 – The Texas Provincial Government authorized the creation of a horse-mounted police force called the Texas Rangers (which is now the Texas Ranger Division of the Texas Department of Public Safety).
1859 – Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species.
1863 – American Civil War: Battle of Lookout Mountain: Near Chattanooga, Tennessee, Union forces under General Ulysses S. Grant captured Lookout Mountain and began to break the Confederate siege of the city led by General Braxton Bragg.
1874 – American inventor Joseph Glidden patented barbed wire.
1877 – Anna Sewell’s animal welfare novel Black Beauty was published.
1917 – In Milwaukee, nine members of the Milwaukee Police Department were killed by a bomb, the most deaths in a single event in U.S. police history until the September 11 attacks in 2001.
1922 – Nine Irish Republican Army members were executed by an Irish Free State firing squad. Among them is author Erskine Childers, who had been arrested for illegally carrying a revolver.
1932 – In Washington, D.C., the FBI Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory (better known as the FBI Crime Lab) officially opened.
1941 – World War II: The United States granted Lend-Lease to the Free French Forces.
1943 – World War II: At the battle of Makin the USS Liscome Bay was torpedoed near Tarawa and sinks. 650 men were killed.
1954 – Air Force One, the first US Presidential airplane, was christened.
1963 – Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President John F. Kennedy, was killed by Jack Ruby.
1966 – The Beatles began recording sessions for their album “Sgt.Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”.
1966 – 400 people died of respiratory failure and heart attacks in New York City smog. It was the smoggiest day in city’s history.
1969 – Apollo program: The Apollo 12 command module splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean and ended the second manned mission to land on the Moon.
1971 – During a severe thunderstorm over Washington state, a hijacker calling himself Dan Cooper (aka D. B. Cooper) parachuted from a Northwest Orient Airlines plane with $200,000 in ransom money. He has never been found.
1973 – A national speed limit was imposed on the Autobahn in Germany because of the 1973 oil crisis. The speed limit lasted only four months.
1974 – Donald Johanson and Tom Gray discovered the 40% complete Australopithecus afarensis skeleton, nicknamed “Lucy” (after The Beatles song “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”), in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia’s Afar Depression.
2012 – Gangnam Style became the most viewed Youtube video surpassing 808 million views.
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