164 BC – Judas Maccabaeus restored the Temple in Jerusalem, an event commemorated each year by the festival of Hanukkah.
235 – Pope Anterus succeeded Pontian as the nineteenth pope.
1272 – Prince Edward became King of England.
1694 Voltaire, French philosopher, was born (d. 1778).
1783 – Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent, Marquis d’Arlandes, made the first untethered hot air balloon flight.
1787 Samuel Cunard, Canadian-born shipping magnate, was born (d. 1865).
1789 – North Carolina ratified the United States Constitution and is admitted as the 12th U.S. state.
1791 – Colonel Napoléon Bonaparte was promoted to full general and appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Armies of the French Republic.
1863 Maori surrendered at Rangiriri.
1877 – Thomas Edison announced his invention of the phonograph, a machine that can record and play sound.
1894 – Port Arthur massacre: Port Arthur, Manchuria fell to the Japanese, a decisive victory of the First Sino-Japanese War.
1905 – Albert Einstein‘s paper, Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?, was published in the journal “Annalen der Physik”. This paper revealed the relationship between energy and mass which led to the mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc².
1910 – Sailors onboard Brazil’s most powerful military units, including the brand-new warships Minas Geraes, São Paulo, and Bahia, violently rebelled in what is now known as the Revolta da Chibata (Revolt of the Whip).
1916 – World War I: A mine exploded and sank HMHS Britannic in the Aegean Sea, killing 30 people.
1920 – Irish War of Independence: In Dublin, 31 people were killed in what became known as “Bloody Sunday“.
1927 – Columbine Mine Massacre: Striking coal miners were allegedly attacked with machine guns by a detachment of state police dressed in civilian clothes.
1936 Victor Chang, Australian physician, was born.
1941 Juliet Mills, British actress, was born.
1942 – The completion of the Alaska Highway (also known as the Alcan Highway) was celebrated (however, it was not usable by general vehicles until 1943).
1945 Goldie Hawn, American actress, was born.
1948 George Zimmer, American entrepreneur, was born.
1953 – The British Natural History Museum announced that the “Piltdown Man” skull, initially believed to be one of the most important fossilized hominid skulls ever found, is a hoax.
1964 – The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge opened to traffic.
1964 – Second Vatican Council: The third session of the Roman Catholic Church’s ecumenical council closed.
1969 – U.S. President Richard Nixon and Japanese Premier Eisaku Sato agreed on the return of Okinawa to Japanese control in 1972.
1969 – The first permanent ARPANET link is established between UCLA and SRI.
1971 – Indian troops, partly aided by Mukti Bahini (Bengali guerrillas), defeat the Pakistan army in the Battle of Garibpur.
1974 – The Birmingham Pub Bombings killed 21 people.
1977 – Minister of Internal Affairs Allan Highet announced that ‘the national anthems of New Zealand would be the traditional anthem “God Save the Queen” and the poem “God Defend New Zealand“, written by Thomas Bracken, as set to music by John Joseph Woods, both being of equal status as national anthems appropriate to the occasion.
1979 – The United States Embassy in Islamabad, was attacked by a mob and set on fire, killing four.
1980 – A fire broke out at the MGM Grand Hotel in Paradise, Nevada (now Bally’s Las Vegas). 87 people were killed and more than 650 injured in the worst disaster in Nevada history.
1980 – Lake Peigneur drained into an underlying salt deposit. A misplaced Texaco oil probe had been drilled into the Diamond Crystal Salt Mine, causing water to flow down into the mine, eroding the edges of the hole. The resulting whirlpool sucked the drilling platform, several barges, houses and trees thousands of feet down to the bottom of the dissolving salt deposit.
1985 – United States Navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard was arrested for spying after being caught giving Israel classified information on Arab nations.
1986 – Iran-Contra Affair: National Security Council member Oliver North and his secretary start to shred documents implicating them in the sale of weapons to Iran and channelling the proceeds to help fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
1990 – The Charter of Paris for a New Europe refocused the efforts of the Conference for Security and Co-operation in European post-Cold War issues.
1995 – The Dayton Peace Agreement was initialed ending three and a half years of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
1996 – A propane explosion at the Humberto Vidal shoe store and office building in San Juan, Puerto Rico killed 33.
2004 – The second round of the Ukrainian presidential election led to massive protests and controversy over the its integrity.
2004 – The island of Dominica was hit by the most destructive earthquake in its history.
2004 – The Paris Club agreed to write off 80% (up to $100 billion) of Iraq’s external debt.
Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia
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