On this day one of the most interesting military commanders of World War II was born. He is most commonly known as Marshal Leclerc, and the French Leclerc battle tank, in production since 1991, is named after him. The Leclerc tank is currently the ma...
On this day the first son of the famous composer Johann Sebastian Bach – Wilhelm Friedemann Bach – was born. It is a very interesting fact that Johann Sebastian had as many as twenty children during his life. Bach married Maria Barbara Bach in 1707,...
Mike Tyson grew up in New York City, in high-crime neighborhoods. He got in trouble as a boy, so that he was arrested 38 times by the age of 13. He never finished high school. His mother died when he was 16 years old, after which his guardian became...
On this day at 12:30 local time, U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot in Dallas, Texas. The first bullet hit him in the back of the neck, slightly damaged his cervical spine and exited in the middle of the throat, below the larynx, damagin...
The piece of Maurice Ravel called Boléro was originally composed as a ballet. The work was commissioned from Ravel by famous Russian ballerina Ida Rubinstein. Ravel was at that time a famous French composer of music for ballets and dances. He got the...
Emperor and King Francis Joseph, ruler of the entire Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, died on this day in 1916. He died at the advanced age of 86 years. He was only 18 years of age when he came to the throne, and so long-lived that his reign became one of...
On this day sank the sister ship of Titanic, Britannic. A trio of same class ocean liners was built: Olympic, Titanic and Britannic. Britannic was the last as well as the largest. Shortly after her launch,the World War I began. The ship was converted...
King Mutesa II – the last King of Buganda and the first President of Uganda – died on this day in 1969. Namely, Buganda was the largest of the Ugandan kingdoms. It also encompassed Kampala – the capital of modern Uganda. Buganda was an old kingdom, o...
On this day in 1969, talks about returning the island of Okinawa to Japan were concluded. Namely, after World War II, Okinawa became part of U.S. territory. The Battle of Okinawa was one of the most famous battles of World War II, when the U.S. took...
The well-known St. Columbanus died on this day in 615. He was a missionary known for founding monasteries throughout Europe. The spreading of monasteries from Ireland towards continental Europe represented an irreplaceable contribution to early medie...
On this day one of the most unusual hostage crisis in history took place. Namely, Muslim dissidents seized the holiest place of Islam – the famous Sacred Mosque in Mecca – and captured the pilgrims therein as hostages. The Sacred Mosque (Arabic: Al-M...
On this day the first Microsoft Windows, version 1.0, were released for sale. They greatly resembled to the Macintosh graphical interface. Microsoft even had to remove some options, such as overlapping windows, to remove the possibility of conflict w...
On this day the American newspaper The Plain Dealer published pictures of the massacre in Vietnam committed by the U.S. military. The massacre took place in the village of My Lai, where between 347 and 504 civilians were killed. The victims were unar...
On this day, six-and-a-half months after the end of World War II, the Nuremberg Trials started. Only the twenty highest-ranking German war criminals were tried (the others were tried separately later). The accused were: the Commander of the Luftwaffe...
On this day the United States finally ended their blockade of Cuba, which marked the ending of one of the most dangerous episodes in the history of the Cold War. Indeed, the Cuban Missile Crisis was one of the eras of human history when mankind was b...
One of the bloodiest episodes in the history of Russian emperors ended on this day. Namely, Tsar Ivan the Terrible, in a quarrel, killed his own son Ivan Ivanovich. The 27-year-old was his eldest son and heir, and carried the title of Tsarevich. The...
On this day the Germans killed about 6,000 Jews during the liquidation of the Janowska concentration camp in Ukraine. This happened after a failed uprising in the camp, which occurred after Germans forced the prisoners to remove all traces of mass mu...
Bonnie Elizabeth Parker and Clyde Chestnut Barrow were in their early twenties (she was 20 years old and he 21) when they, during the Great Depression in the United States, set off on a path of crime and lawlessness. When they met, Clyde had already...
One of the most famous speeches in world history, which American children learn by heart in schools, was delivered on this day in 1863. The speech was spoken on the occasion of the opening of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery for the victims of the Bat...
On this day in 1912, during the First Balkan War, the Serbian army defeated a much larger army of the Ottoman Empire near Bitola, Macedonia. This victory allowed Serbia to take most of the territory that belongs to the modern Republic of Macedonia. A...
The currently reigning sultan of the state of Oman was born on this day. His name is Qaboos bin Said al Said and he has already held power for over 40 years. Oman is one of the few modern states that still have an absolutist system of government. In...
On this day in 1202 occurred one of the most paradoxical events in the history of the Crusades. The Crusader army conquered the Christian city of Zadar in Dalmatia. What was the cause of such crimes of Christians against Christians? The answer lies i...
On this day the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), backed up by Serbian volunteer units, entered Vukovar after several months of siege. The defenders of the Mitinca city district surrendered at around 15:30. Some veteran groups continued to fight in some...
On this day occurred the greatest loss of human lives in contemporary American history, with the exception of natural disasters and the September 11attacks. Namely, on this day in 1978 a mass suicide of 909 members of the Peoples Temple cult took pla...
On this day Irish writer and playwright George Bernard Shaw refused to accept money from the Nobel Prize. The award amounted to 116.960 kronor (which today would be worth about half a million U.S. dollars). Shaw initially wanted to refuse the Nobel P...
On this day the famous Thomas Woodrow Wilson was elected U.S. President. He was the first and only U.S. president with a doctorate. It is quite disappointing that no other American president managed to attain the highest academic degree of Doctor of...
The most famous empress in Russian history – Catherine the Great – died on this day. The period of her reign is considered the “Golden Age” in the history of the Russian Empire. Although her rule was an absolutist one, she introduced many positive re...
Arnold Schwarzenegger was born in Austria, in Thal, only 3 kilometers from the Styrian capital Graz. Schwarzenneger’s father Gustav was a local police chief and a former member of the Austrian Nazi party. It was proven, however, that he was not respo...
On this day in 1970 American inventor Douglas Engelbart obtained a patent (U.S. Patent 3,541,541) for a computer mouse. In the patent application the device was called “X-Y position indicator for a display system”. Douglas Engelbart, otherwise an exp...
The International Students’ Day is celebrated on this day, to commemorate the tragic events that occured on this day in 1939, in Prague. The events began to unfold a few days earlier, when the Nazis killed one student of the University in Prague. Tho...
