On This Day

This Day in History

1. 2023Parts of Slovenia were impacted by major flooding.
2. 2019A mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, resulted in 23 deaths and left 22 other people injured.
3. 2009HMNB Devonport in England welcomed back the final vessels from Taurus 09, a 20,400-mile (32,800 km) Royal Navy training deployment.
4. 2005Mauritanian president Maaouya Ould Sid'Ahmed Taya was deposed in a military coup while attending King Fahd of Saudi Arabia's funeral.
5. 1997The 328-meter (1,076 ft) Sky Tower opened in Auckland, New Zealand, becoming the tallest free-standing structure in the Southern Hemisphere at the time.
6. 1975A privately chartered Boeing 707 crashed into a mountain peak near Agadir, Morocco, resulting in 188 fatalities.
7. 1971The fossil specimen known as Fighting Dinosaurs, depicting a Protoceratops and Velociraptor locked in combat, was discovered in Mongolia's Djadochta Formation.
8. 1940During World War II, Italian troops launched an invasion of British Somaliland, successfully capturing the territory within 16 days.
9. 1936African-American athlete Jesse Owens secured his first of four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics, thwarting Nazi leaders' expectations of Aryan dominance at the event.
10. 1929Jiddu Krishnamurti, viewed by certain Theosophists as a prospective "World Teacher" messiah, disbanded the Order of the Star, an organization created to support his role.
11. 1913A strike by agricultural workers in Wheatland escalated into a riot, marking one of California's earliest major farm-labor clashes.
12. 1903Macedonian insurgents in Kruševo declared a republic, which survived for ten days until Ottoman forces destroyed the town.
13. 1857During the Indian Rebellion, an eight-day siege of a fortified outbuilding in Arrah held by 68 defenders against over 10,000 attackers concluded when a relief force scattered the besieging troops.
14. 1460James II of Scotland died at Roxburgh Castle due to an exploding cannon.
15. 1347During the Hundred Years' War, the Crécy campaign concluded when the French town of Calais surrendered to English troops following an eleven-month siege.
16. 1057Pope Stephen IX was crowned as the leader of the Catholic Church.