1228: St Francis of Assissi was canonized.
1377: Richard II was officially crowned King of England. Luckily for Shakespare, if not for the country.
1790: The Congress of a very young country declares that its new nation’s capital shall be located on a site between Maryland and Virginia, rather humid and swampy, and named “The Dictrict of Columbia.”
1918: The last ruling dynasty of Russia, the Romanovs, are excecuted as a family in a cellar in Yekaterinburg. Conspiracy theories, including those which based several Hollywood movies on the stories of “survivors” abound over the next eighty years, but in 1991 most of them are put to rest with the recovery and DNA testing, of the remains found in a forest near the site. The remains of daughter, the Grand Duchess Anastasia, have still not been located, and so her remains (while being ruled out as those of fraudulent claimants to the throne over the years) have never been found.
1941: New York Yankee slugger Joe DiMaggio (also, for a time, Marilyn Monroe’s famous husband) continues his hitting streak, which stands as a record to this day.
1945: The world’s first atomic bomb explodes, as part of a test, near Alamogordo, New Mexico.
Also, 1945: Churchill, Stalin, and Truman met at Potsdam.
1951: JD Salinger’s novel, The Catcher in the Rye, is first published.
1969: Apollo 11 blasts off from Cape Kennedy, on its historic mission to land the first men on the moon.
1979: Saddam Hussein became the President of Iraq.
1998: The United Nations Criminal Court was established, and began to sit four years later.
1999: John F. Kennedy Jr, his wife Carolyn, and his sister-in-law, Lauren Bessette are killed in a plane crash off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Kennedy was piloting the plane. Many feel that the circumstances of the event have never been fully explained.
2009: American journalist Walter Cronkite died at the age of 92.
There’s much, much, more. Have at it.
