161 – Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius dies and is succeeded by co-Emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, an unprecedented political arrangement in the Roman Empire
1530 – English King Henry VIII’s divorce request is denied by the Pope.
1876 – Alexander Graham Bell receives a patent for the telephone in the US
1912 – Roald Amundsen announces discovery of the South Pole
1936 – Hitler breaks Treaty of Versailles by sending troops to the Rhineland
1950 – Volkswagen, maker of the Beetle automobile, expands its product offerings to include a microbus, which goes into production on this day in 1950.
1965 – State troopers used nightsticks and tear gas to attack American civil rights activists as they crossed a bridge in Selma, Alabama, during their march to the state capitol in Montgomery.
1968 – The BBC broadcasts the news for the first time in color on television
1971 – Egypt refuses to renew the Suez cease fire
1976 – Morocco & Mauretania break diplomatic relations with Algeria
1977 – Israeli PM Yitzhak Rabin meets US President Jimmy Carter
1981 – 1st homicide at Disneyland, 18 year old is stabbed to death
1986 – South-Africa emergency crisis in Brabant & Limburg ends
1989 – Iran drops diplomatic relations with Britain over Salman Rushdie’s book “Satanic Verses”
1989 – Partial eclipse of the Sun (Hawaii, NW North America, Greenland)
1991 – Iraq continues to explode oil fields in Kuwait
1994 – David Platt appointed captain of English football team
1996 – 1st surface photos of Pluto (photographed by Hubble Space Telescope)
2004 – New Democracy wins the national elections in Greece.
2005 – Mass protest outside the National Assembly of Kuwait building for women’s voting rights in Kuwait.
2007 – British House of Commons votes to make the upper chamber, the House of Lords, 100% elected
2015 – 54 people are killed & 143 are wounded by 5 Boko Haram suicide bombings in Maiduguri city, Nigeria
2019 – Chinese telecommunications company Huawei sues the US government over a federal ban on its products
2019 – Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain shares her first Instagram post, a letter between mathematician Charles Babbage and Prince Albert
2019 – Power and communications blackout begins in Venezuela
Births & Deaths: 1872 – Painter Piet Mondrian—who was an important leader in the development of modern abstract art, known for works that possess a formal purity that embodies his spiritual belief in a harmonious cosmos—was born in Amersfoort, Netherlands.
1999 – American director and writer Stanley Kubrick—whose iconic films are characterized by a cool, formal visual style, meticulous attention to detail, and a detached, often ironic pessimism—died in England.
Film: 1975 – “Mirror”, Russian film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, starring Margarita Terekhova and Ignat Daniltsev, is released.
Music: 1917 – 1st jazz record released on a 78 by Original Dixieland Jass Band for the Victor Talking Machine Company (“Dixie Jazz Band One Step,” one side “Livery Stable Blues” other)
Sport: 2009 – Despite only being 17 years old, Brazilian soccer star Neymar makes his professional debut for Santos
