This date in history

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1774 The British parliament passes first of the Intolerable Acts: the Boston Port Act, which closed Boston harbor until colonists would pay for damages following the Boston Tea Party.

1800 Alessandro Volta reports his discovery of the electric battery in a letter to Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society of London.

1815 Napoléon Bonaparte enters Paris after his escape from Elba, begins 100-day rule.

1917 After the sinking of 3 more American merchant ships, US President Woodrow Wilson meets with cabinet, who agree that war is inevitable.

1922 USS Langley is commissioned, US Navy's 1st aircraft carrier.

1933 Dachau the first Nazi concentration camp, is completed.

1942 General Douglas MacArthur vows "I came through and I shall return" after escaping Japanese-occupied Philippines.

1943 German U-384 bombed & sinks.

1972 Donegall Street bombing: the Provisional Irish Republican Army detonate its first car bomb on Donegall Street in Belfast; four civilians, two RUC officers and a UDR soldier killed while 148 people were wounded.

1993 IRA-bomb kills 3-year-old in Warrington, England.

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1933 Day of Potsdam in Nazi Germany, a ceremony to open the new Reichstag after the fire in February; Adolf Hitler and Paul von Hindenburg shake hands in public.

1943 Assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler fails.

1944 US General Eisenhower postpones invasion of the south of France until after Normandy.

1945 1st Japanese kamikaze "flying bombs" (MXY-7 Ohka) attack Okinawa.

1963 Alcatraz prison in San Francisco Bay is closed.

1989 1st sea test of Trident 2 missile self-destructs, Cape Canaveral, Florida.

2014 Russia formally annexes Crimea amid international condemnation.

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1622 First American Indian (Powhatan) massacre of Europeans in Jamestown Virginia, 347 killed.

1941 James Stewart is inducted into the Army, becoming the first major American movie star to wear a military uniform in World War II

1944 American movie star James Stewart flies his 12th combat mission, leading the 2nd Bomb Wing in an attack on Berlin.

1965 US confirms its troops used chemical warfare against the Vietcong.

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1775 Patrick Henry proclaims "Give me liberty or give me death" in speech in favor of Virginian troops joining US Revolutionary war.

1918 Germany begins using long-range gun, the 'Kaiser Wilhelm Geschütz' ('Emperor William Gun'), aka 'Paris Gun' to shell Paris from Crépy-en-Laonnais, 75 miles away; over several days, 303 rounds kill 256 and wound over 600

1919 8th Congress of the Russian Communist Party re-establishes a five-member Politburo which becomes the center of political power in the Soviet Union. Original members Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin, Lev Kamenev and Nikolai Krestinsky.

1921 Germany announces it will be unable to meet its Great War reparation payments.

1933 German Reichstag hastily passes the Enabling Act and President Paul von Hindenburg signs it the same day, granting Adolf Hitler dictatorial powers.

1945 Battle of Okinawa: US Navy ships bomb the Japanese island of Okinawa in preparation for the Allied invasion; it would become the largest battle of the Pacific War in World War II

1957 US army sells last homing pigeons.

2019 Syrian Democratic Forces announce that the last Islamic State territory has been retaken raising flags in Baghuz, Syria and ending the five-year Islamic State "caliphate"

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1603 Scottish King James VI son of Mary Queen of Scots, becomes King James I of England in succession to Elizabeth I, thus joining the English and Scottish crowns.

1916 German submarines torpedo the unarmed French cross-channel packet 'Sussex'

1942 US government begins moving native-born citizens with Japanese ancestry into detention centres under Executive Order 9066, with intention of preventing home-grown espionage.

1944 76 Allied officers escape Stalag Luft 3 (Great Escape)

1944 Ardeatine massacre: Nazis led by SS officers Herbert Kappler, Erich Priebke and Karl Hass execute 335 civilians and political prisoners in occupied Rome in retaliation for the previous day's Via Rassela bombing that killed 33 Germans.

1944 RAF rear gunner Nicholas Alkemade survives a jump from his Lancaster bomber 18,000 feet over Germany without a parachute; his fall broken by pine trees and soft snow, suffers only a sprained leg.

1945 Operation Varsity: In the largest one-day airborne operation of all time, British, US & Canadian paratroopers land east of the Rhine in Northern Germany.

1947 John D. Rockefeller Jr. donates NYC East River site to the UN

1949 SS police chief in the Netherlands Hanns Albin Rauter's request for a pardon denied, executed by firing squad.

1958 Elvis Presley joins the U.S. Army (serial number 53310761)

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1807 British Parliament abolishes the slave trade throughout the British Empire; penalty of £120 per slave introduced for ship captains.

1915 1st submarine disaster; a US F-4 sinks off Hawaii, killing 21

1917 Canadian flying ace Billy Bishop claims his first victory, shooting down and mortally wounding German Leutnant Theiller.

1949 The Soviet Union begins Operation Pribioi, the mass deportation of 90,000 Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians to inhospitable areas in the Soviet Union.

1960 First guided missile launched from a nuclear powered submarine (USS Halibut)

1961 Elvis Presley performs live at Pearl Harbor’s Bloch Arena in a benefit for the USS Arizona Memorial; his return to the concert stage after a stint in the US Army raises $60K and worldwide awareness of the project.

1970 Concorde makes its 1st supersonic flight (700 MPH/1,127 KPH)

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1910 US forbids immigration to criminals, anarchists, paupers and the sick.

1917 British win a battle against Turks at Gaza.

1942 First "Eichmann transport" to Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps.

1970 The Police (Northern Ireland) Act becomes law; the act provides for the disarmament of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and the establishment of an RUC reserve force.

1976 Queen Elizabeth II sent out the first royal email, from the Royal Signals and Radar Establishment.

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1915 Typhoid Mary [Mary Mallon] is arrested and returned to quarantine on North Brother Island, New York after spending five years evading health authorities and causing several further outbreaks of typhoid.

1941 Adolf Hitler signs Directive 27 (assault on Yugoslavia)

1941 Britain leases defense bases in Trinidad to US for 99 years.

1942 -28] Allies raid German submarine base in St Nazaire.

1943 Dutch resistance fighters burn and bomb the Amsterdam civil registry office in effort to destroy records and prevent the Nazis from identifying Jews and others marked for persecution; about 15% of records destroyed and 12 of the 19 known participants were tried and executed by the Nazi occupiers.

1945 British Prime Minister Winston Churchill sails to eastern banks of Rhine.

1945 Operation Starvation, the aerial mining of Japan's ports and waterways begins.

1964 Great Train Robbers sentenced to a total of 307 years behind bars.

1977 583 die in aviation's worst ever disaster when two Boeing 747s collide at Tenerife airport in Spain.

2004 HMS Scylla, a decommissioned Leander class frigate, is sunk as an artificial reef off Cornwall, the first of its kind in Europe.

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1854 Great Britain and France declare war on Russia, expanding the Crimean War.

1910 First seaplane takes off from water under its own power, piloted by Henri Fabre from the Étang de Berre lagoon at Martigues, France.

1917 Jews are expelled from Tel Aviv & Jaffa by Turkish authorities.

1941 Sea battle at Cape Matapan: British fleet under Cunningham defeats Italy.

1942 British naval forces raid Nazi occupied French port of St Nazaire.

1942 St. Nazaire Raid (Operation Chariot): obsolete British destroyer HMS Campbeltown, rigged with explosives and flying German flags, rams gates of German occupied St Nazaire port in France, and self detonates; kills 360 Germans, and disables the dry dock for duration of the war.

1945 Last German V-1 (buzz bomb) attack on London.

[August]

1998 My father passed away at age 68. RIP Dad.

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Parents are always a major miss Dave, I remember my old man used to say "Whoever invented old age should have been shot"

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1848 Niagara Falls stops flowing for 30 hours due to an ice jam in the river upstream.

1912 Captain Robert Falcon Scott, storm-bound in a tent near the South Pole, makes last entry in his diary "the end cannot be far"

1942 British cruiser HMS Trinidad torpedoes itself in the Barents Sea.

1942 German submarine U-585 sinks.

1945 Movie star James Stewart promoted to full colonel, one of the few Americans to rise from private to colonel in four years.

2022 In a major victory for Ukraine, Russia announces it is withdrawing its badly mauled forces from around Ukraine's capital, Kyiv.

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1856 The Russian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, Great Britain, France and the Kingdom of Sardinia sign the Treaty of Paris ending the Crimean War.

1867 The United States buys Alaska from Russia for $7,200,000 (109 million in 2018 dollars), roughly 2 cents an acre.

1870 Texas becomes last confederate state readmitted to Union.

1945 A defecting German pilot delivers a Messerschmitt Me 262A-1 to Americans.

1949 Riot breaks out in Austurvöllur square in Reykjavík, when Iceland joins NATO

1969 Loyalists bomb water and electricity installations in Northern Ireland in the hope that the attacks would be blamed on the IRA and on elements of the civil rights movement, which was demanding an end to discrimination against Catholics.

1972 Northern Ireland's Government and Parliament dissolved by the British Government and 'direct rule' from Westminster is introduced.

1979 Airey Neave, a British politician, is killed by a car bomb as he exits the Palace of Westminster. The Irish National Liberation Army claims responsibility.

1984 World's most valuable tip - New York police detective Robert Cunningham offers waitress Phyllis Penzo half of $1 lottery ticket, next day they win $6 million.

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1889 Eiffel Tower officially opens in Paris. Designed by Gustave Eiffel and built for the Exposition Universelle, at 300m high it retains the record for the tallest man made structure for 41 years.

1920 British parliament accepts Irish Home Rule law.

1939 Britain & France agree to support Poland if invaded by Germany.

1954 USSR offers to join NATO

1958 US Navy forms atomic submarine division.

1970 Following an Orange Order parade, intense riots erupt on the Springfield Road in Belfast; violence lasts for three days, and the British Army use CS gas for the first time in large quantities.

1972 Final day of the rum ration in the Royal Canadian Navy.

1979 The last British soldier leaves the Maltese Islands. Malta declares its Freedom Day (Jum il-Helsien).

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1318 Berwick-upon-Tweed is captured by the Scottish from the English.

1918 United Kingdom: the Royal Air Force is created from the Royal Naval Air Service and the Royal Flying Corps.

1924 Adolf Hitler sentenced to 5 years labor for "Beer Hall Putsch" but General Ludendorff acquitted.

1933 Heinrich Himmler becomes Police Commander of Germany.

1941 The Blockade Runner Badge for German Kriegsmarine is instituted.

1969 The Hawker Siddeley Harrier (vertical take-off fighter) enters service with the RAF.

1970 John Lennon and Yoko Ono release hoax they are having dual sex change operations.

1986 US submarine Nathaniel Green runs aground in Irish Sea.

1976 Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs found Apple Computer in the garage of Jobs' parents house in Cupertino, California.

1991 Warsaw Pact officially dissolves.

1992 Battleship USS Missouri, on which the Japanese surrender took place, decommissioned.