On This Day

This Day in History

1. 2000Speakers' Corner, designated as a free speech area inside Hong Lim Park in Singapore, was officially launched.
2. 1973The deepest sub rescue in history was successfully accomplished in the Irish Sea following a 76-hour multinational rescue operation.
3. 1972American chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer defeated Soviet Boris Spassky to become the 11th World Chess Champion in a match widely publicized as a Cold War confrontation.
4. 1969Muammar Gaddafi led a coup d'état that successfully overthrew King Idris of Libya.
5. 1967Eight nations issued the Khartoum Resolution during an Arab League summit, declaring "no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, [and] no negotiations with it".
6. 1966Outbreaking riots in Dayton, Ohio, led to one death and prompted the mobilization of the Ohio National Guard.
7. 1952Ernest Hemingway's novel The Old Man and the Sea, which subsequently earned the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, was published for the first time.
8. 1939World War II began in Europe when German forces launched attacks on several Polish locations, including Westerplatte and Wieluń.
9. 1937Soviet authorities deported an initial group of approximately 172,000 Koreans from the Russian Far East to the Kazakh and Uzbek SSRs, resulting in the deaths of about 10 to 25 percent.
10. 1914The passenger pigeon, a species that formerly had a population in the billions, became extinct after its final surviving individual died in captivity.
11. 1911Workers broke ground on the Saline Valley salt tram, which later held the record as the steepest tram in the United States while in service.
12. 1902A Trip to the Moon, the inaugural science fiction film adapted from Jules Verne's From the Earth to the Moon, premiered in France.
13. 1872In Orange Walk Town, British Honduras, a small British force led by a surgeon successfully repelled a surprise attack by the Maya.
14. 1862During the American Civil War, Confederate forces ambushed retreating Union troops amidst a rainstorm in Chantilly, Virginia, resulting in an inconclusive battle.
15. 1859A intense solar flare produced a coronal mass ejection that hit Earth hours later, creating the most powerful geomagnetic storm on record and brilliant middle-latitude aurorae.
16. 1804Karl Ludwig Harding, a German astronomer, discovered one of the largest main-belt asteroids and named it Juno after the Roman goddess.