In the day of my trouble I shall call upon Thee, For Thou wilt answer me.


– Psalm 86:7 

0523: Death of St. Bridgid 0772: Election of Adrian I as Pope

1327: Coronation of Edward III as King of England.

1328: Death of Charles IV, "the Fair," King of France

1500: The city of Milan rebels against the French occupation

1587: Elizabeth I, Queen of England, signs the Warrant of Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots

1633: The codification of the Virginia tobacco laws takes place.

1790: The Supreme Court of the United States convened in New York City for its first session.

1788: Isaac Briggs and William Longstreet patented the steamboat.

1793: France declared war on England and Holland.

1840: The world's first dental college opened in Baltimore, Maryland.

1861: Texas voted to secede from the Union.

1862: "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" was first published in "Atlantic Monthly". The lyric was the work of Julia Ward Howe.

1867: Bricklayers start working 8-hour days.

1884: The first volume of the Oxford English Dictionary was published.

1890: "Semi-barbaric." That was the word used to describe Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony in the New York Post. The Post reviewer went on to describe the symphony's orchestral colors as "decidedly too loud."

1893: Inventor Thomas A. Edison completed work on the world's first motion picture studio, his "Black Maria," in West Orange, New Jersey.

1896: Puccini's opera "La Boheme" premiered in Turin.

1898: What's believed by some to be the first auto insurance policy was issued by the Travelers Insurance Company of Hartford, Connecticut, to a Dr. Truman J. Martin of Buffalo, New York. He paid $11.25 for the policy, which gave him $5,000 in liability coverage.

1902: U.S. Secretary of State John Hay protests Russian privileges in China as a violation of the "open door policy."

1904: Britain and France agree to stay neutral if Japan and Russia go to war.

1905: Germany contests French rule in Morocco.

1908: King Carlos I of Portugal was assassinated together with his son in Lisbon.

1909: U.S. troops leave Cuba after installing Jose Miguel Gomez as president.

1915: Passport photographs were first required in Great Britain.

1919: The first Miss America was crowned, not in Atlantic City, but in New York City. Edith Hyde, it was discovered, was not a Miss. She was Mrs. Tod Robbins, the mother of two children.

1920: The Royal Canadian Mounted Police came into existence.

1920: The 1st armored car is introduced.

1942: Vidkun Quisling became prime minister of Norway.

1924: The British government recognizes the U.S.S.R.

1939: Benny Goodman and his orchestra recorded "And the Angels Sing", on Victor Records.

1940: Frank Sinatra cut his first record with the Tommy Dorsey Band. The song was ``The Sky Fell Down.''

1942: The U.S. Pacific fleet batters Japanese bases in the Marshall and Gilbert Islands.

1943: American tanks and infantry are battered at German positions in Fais pass.

1943: One of America's most highly decorated military units of World War Two, the 442d Regimental Combat Team, made up almost entirely of Japanese-Americans, was authorized.

1944: U.S. forces take the beaches on the Marshall Islands.

1945: U.S. Rangers and Filipino guerrillas rescue 513 American survivors of the Bataan "death march".

1946: Norwegian statesman Trygve Lie was chosen to be the first secretary-general of the United Nations.

1951: Third A-bomb tests are completed in the desert of Nevada.

1958: Egypt and Syria proclaimed the union of their two countries in a state to be known as "The United Arab Republic."

1960: Four black college students began a sit-in protest at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, where they'd been refused service.

1963: Kamuzu Banda was sworn in as the first prime minister of Nyasaland (Malawi).

1964: President Lyndon B. Johnson rejects de Gaulle’s plan for a neutral Vietnam.

1965: Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and 770 others are arrested in protest against voter discrimination in Alabama.

1968: During the Vietnam War, Saigon's police chief (Nguyen Ngoc Loan) executed a Viet Cong officer with a pistol shot to the head in a scene captured in a famous news photograph.

1968: South Vietnam President Nguyen Van Thieu declares martial law.

1968: Richard M. Nixon enters the presidential race.

1971: The soundtrack album from the movie, "Love Story", starring Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw, with music by Frances Lai, was certified as a gold record.

1971: Evonne Goolagong scored her first major senior singles victory as she defeated Margaret Court in the finals of the Victorian Open, played in Melbourne, Australia.

1974: More than 220 people died in a fire in a newly built skyscraper in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

1979: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini received a tumultuous welcome in Tehran as he ended nearly 15 years of exile.

1986: Two days of anti-government riots in Port-au-Prince result in 14 dead.

1987: Terry Williams of Los Gatos, California, won the largest slot machine payoff to that time, winning $4.9 million after getting four lucky 7s on a machine in Reno, Nevada.

1988: Denying any wrongdoing, Attorney General Edwin Meese the Third said he didn't recall a portion of a memo from a friend concerning a proposed Iraqi pipeline project that referred to a plan to bribe Israeli officials.

1989: In his first diplomatic mission of the Bush administration, Vice President Quayle began a trip to Venezuela and El Salvador.

1990: East Germany's Communist premier, Hans Modrow, appealed for negotiations with West Germany to forge a "united fatherland."

1991: Thirty-five people were killed when a US-Air jetliner crashed atop a commuter plane on a runway at Los Angeles International Airport. 

1991: South African President F.W. de Klerk said he would repeal all remaining apartheid laws. 

1992: George Bush and Boris Yeltsin held their first meeting since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The two presidents vowed to work together to democratize Russia.

1992: Ron Carey was sworn in as the first Teamsters president elected by the union's rank-and-file.

1992: Federal judge Irving R. Kaufman, who sentenced Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death, died in New York at age 81.

1993: Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin announced his country would repatriate about 100 Palestinians deported to Lebanon, an offer rejected by the deportees.

1993: Eduardo Mata and the Dallas Symphony recorded on Dorian. It's an all-Respighi program, "The Pines of Rome," "Roman Festivals," and a far less known piece called "Brazilian Impressions."

1994: United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali backed the use of air power in Bosnia.

1994: Jeff Gillooly, Tonya Harding's ex-husband, pleaded guilty in Portland, Oregon, to taking part in the attack on figure skater Nancy Kerrigan. Gillooly struck a plea bargain under which he confessed to racketeering charges in exchange for testimony implicating Harding.

1995: Communist Vietnam raised its red flag in Washington for the first time 20 years after the end of the Vietnam War as the two old foes began a new chapter, opening liaison offices in each others' capital.

1995: The Federal Reserve boosted interest rates by 0.5 percent, the seventh rate hike in a year. House Republicans pushed through a bill restricting the federal government's ability to impose unfunded mandates on states.

1996: Both houses of Congress voted overwhelmingly to rewrite the 61-year-old Communications Act, freeing the exploding television, telephone and home computer industries to jump into each other's fields.

1996: Poland's president named Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz, an ex-communist leader who had often stood outside his dominant party's mainstream, as prime minister to lead the country out of political crisis. 

1997: Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori said he would open a "preliminary dialogue" with rebels holding 72 hostages in Lima, but again rejected their main demand that the government release their jailed comrades.

1997: Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Herb Caen died in San Francisco at age 80.

1998: With Israeli and Palestinian leaders digging in their heels, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright conceded she'd made little progress in a whirlwind visit to the region to prod the two sides closer together.

1999: With the promise of huge federal surpluses, President Clinton proposed a $1.77 trillion budget for fiscal 2000.

1999: Former White House intern Monica Lewinsky gave a deposition that was videotaped for senators weighing impeachment charges against President Clinton.

2000: Senator John McCain defeated Texas Governor George W. Bush to win the Republican New Hampshire primary; Vice President Al Gore edged Bill Bradley to win the Democratic primary.