The Times On This Day: Facts and trivia for every day of the year. James Owen
John Steinbeck, novelist, was born in Salinas, California.
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1933 arson destroyed part of Germany’s Reichstag building, leading to the suspension of civil liberties.
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1939 General Franco’s rebel Nationalist Government was recognised by Britain and France.
1533 Michel de Montaigne, philosopher who popularised the essay form, was born.
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1900 after a four-month siege during the Boer War, the 20,000-strong British garrison in Ladysmith was relieved.
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1922 Lord Allenby, high commissioner in Egypt, announced the termination of the British protectorate and the inception of Egyptian independence.
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1956 Jay Forrester patented random-access coincident-current magnetic storage, which would become the standard memory device for computers.
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1975 a London Underground train crashed at Moorgate station, killing 35 people.
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1986 the Swedish prime minister Olof Palme was assassinated while walking home in Stockholm, a crime that remains unsolved.
1868 Conservative Party leader Benjamin Disraeli formed his first government.
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1880 the 9.3-mile St Gotthard railway tunnel, then the longest in the world, was completed, linking Switzerland and Italy.
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1940 Hattie McDaniel became the first African-American actress to win an Oscar, for Gone With the Wind.
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1956 Pakistan became an Islamic republic.
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1960 thousands of people were killed in an earthquake in Agadir, Morocco.
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1960 Hugh Hefner opened the first Playboy Club in Chicago.
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1984 Pierre Trudeau resigned after 15 years as premier of Canada.
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1996 the siege of Sarajevo ended after almost seven years.
1360 during the siege of Rheims, King Edward III contributed £16 towards the ransom of Geoffrey Chaucer, then serving as a soldier.
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1872 US president Ulysses S Grant established America’s first national park, Yellowstone.
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1912 George Grossmith, co-author of The Diary of a Nobody and the comic lead in Gilbert and Sullivan’s early productions, died.
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1932 Charles Augustus, the 20-month-old son of the American aviator Charles Lindbergh, was abducted from his nursery and later found dead.
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1966 the unmanned Soviet probe Venera 3 impacted on Venus, becoming the first spacecraft to land on another planet.
1882 Queen Victoria narrowly escaped assassination by Roderick Maclean as she sat in her railway carriage at Windsor station, this being the eighth attempt made on her life since the start of her reign.
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1949 Captain James Gallagher and his US air force crew completed the first round-the-world non-stop flight (23,452 miles in 94 hours and 1 minute).
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1956 Morocco declared its political independence from France.
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1958 the British Trans-Antarctic Expedition, led by Dr Vivian Fuchs, completed the first surface crossing of Antarctica.
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1970 Ian Smith, the Rhodesian prime minister, declared his country an independent republic.
1875 the first performance of Carmen at Paris’s Opéra-Comique was so poorly received that it was thought to have hastened the death of its composer, Georges Bizet.
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1894 six months after his second Home Rule Bill had been defeated by the House of Lords, William Gladstone resigned as prime minister.
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1924 Turkish president Mustafa Kemal Atatürk abolished the caliphate (the Islamic leadership of the Ottoman sultans).
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1931 the US Congress adopted The Star-Spangled Banner as the American national anthem.
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1991 Rodney King was filmed being beaten by Los Angeles police officers, leading to widespread riots.
1461 King Henry VI was deposed by his cousin Edward, Duke of York (who became King Edward IV).
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1789 the Congress of the United States held its first meeting in New York.
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1824 the National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck was founded (from 1854, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution).
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1890 the last of eight million rivets holding together 55,000 tons of steel was driven home at the opening ceremony of the Forth Bridge.
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