May the LORD answer you in the day of trouble! May the name of the God of Jacob set you securely on high!


Psalm 20:1

0309: Death of St. Pamphilus

0309: Martyrdom of St. Elias

1001: Roman barons put the Pope and Holy Roman Emperor to flight

1220: Bokhara falls to the Mongols

1486: Maximillian I chosen King of Germany

1525: The monks of Glastonbury Abbey meet again to elect a new Abbot, and entrust the decision to Cardinal Wolsey

1579: Death of Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada, explorer of Columbia

1642: First Postal Service in Scotland

1659: 1st known check (on display at Westminster Abbey)

1741: Benjamin Franklin first published America's second magazine, "The General Magazine and Historical Chronicle" on this day.

1804: Lieutenant Stephen Decatur led a successful raid into Tripoli Harbor to burn the US Navy frigate "Philadelphia," which had fallen into the hands of pirates.

1829: The father of the French symphony, Francois-Joseph Gossec, died at the age of 95.

1857: The National Deaf Mute College was incorporated in Washington, DC. It was the first school in the world for advanced education of the deaf. It was later renamed Gallaudet College.

1862: During the Civil War, some 14,000 Confederate soldiers surrendered at Fort Donelson, Tennessee.

1868: The Jolly Gorks organization, in New York City, decided to change their goofy name to the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks (BPOE). The purpose of the fraternal group: "...practice charity, justice, brotherly love and faithfulness."

1883: Ladies Home Journal begins publication.

1908: A funeral procession for a New York City fire chief was held. The drum of the cortege was heard by a guest at the Hotel Majestic who found the occasion so moving that he cried and wrote the drum stroke into his Tenth Symphony. We're talking, of course, about Mahler.

1914: 1st airplane flight to Los Angeles from San Francisco.

1918: Lithuania proclaimed its independence.

1920: The Allies accept Berlin's offer to try World War I war criminals in Leipzig's Supreme Court.

1923: Archaeologists opened the treasure-laden tomb of Tutankhamen, "King Tut," in Egypt's Valley of the Kings.

1932: The first fruit tree patent was issued to James E. Markham for a peach tree which ripens later than other varieties.

1934: Thousands of Socialists battle Communists at a rally in New York's Madison Square Garden.

1937: Wallace H. Carothers, of Dupont, patents a new thread, nylon, which will replace silk in a number of products and reduce costs.

1942: Tojo outlines Japan's war aims to the Diet, referring to "new order of coexistence" in East Asia.

1945: American troops landed on the island of Corregidor in the Philippines during World War Two.

1948: NBC TV began airing its first nightly newscast, "The Camel Newsreel Theatre," which consisted of Fox Movietone newsreels.

1951: Stalin contends the U.N. is becoming the weapon of aggressive war.

1952: The FBI arrests 10 members of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina.

1957: A U.S. flag flies over an outpost in Wilkes Land, Antarctica.

1959: Fidel Castro became premier of Cuba after the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista.

1960: Tthe United States nuclear submarine Triton began its underwater round-the-world trip.

1961: The United States launched the Explorer 9 satellite.

1963: The Beatles got their first #1 British hit single -- "Please Please Me."

1965: Four persons are held in a plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty, Liberty Bell and the Washington Monument.

1966: The World Council of Churches being held in Geneva, urges immediate peace in Vietnam. Vietnam was the war that five presidents "owned"--and yet no president "owned."

1968: The nation's first 9-1-1 emergency telephone system was inaugurated, in Haleyville, Alabama.

1968: Elvis Presley received a gold record for his sacred album of hymns, "How Great Thou Art".

1972: Los Angeles Lakers basketball great, Wilt Chamberlain topped the 30,000 point mark in his career during a game against the Phoenix Suns.

1977: Janani Luwum, the Anglican archbishop of Uganda, and two other men were killed in what Ugandan authorities said was an automobile accident.

1978: China and Japan sign a $20 billion trade pact, which is the most important move since the 1972 resumption of diplomatic ties.

1980: At the Winter Olympic games in Lake Placid, New York, American speed skater Eric Heiden captured the second of five gold medals, while the U.S. Hockey team defeated Norway 5-1.

1985: Israeli troops completed the first step of a three-stage withdrawal from South Lebanon, two days earlier than planned.

1985: Ray 'Boom Boom' Mancini lost the World Boxing Association lightweight championship crown to Livingston Bramble.

1986: Philippine presidential candidate Corazon Aquino called for nonviolent protests against Ferdinand E. Marcos, a day after Marcos was declared the winner of a presidential election tainted by charges of fraud.

1986: Mario Soares was elected Portugal's first civilian head of state in 60 years.

1987: John Demjanjuk went on trial in Jerusalem, accused of being "Ivan the Terrible," a guard at the Treblinka concentration camp. (Demjanjuk was convicted, but the conviction ended up being overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court.)

1988: Vice President George Bush and Massachusetts Governor Michael S. Dukakis scored big victories in the New Hampshire Republican and Democratic presidential primaries.

1988: Seven people were shot to death during an office rampage in Sunnyvale, California. The gunman, Richard Farley, was later sentenced to death.

1989: Investigators in Lockerbie, Scotland, said a bomb hidden inside a radio-cassette player was what brought down Pan Am Flight 103 the previous December, killing all 259 people aboard and eleven on the ground.

1990: Former President Ronald Reagan began two days of giving a videotaped deposition in a Los Angeles courtroom for the Iran-Contra trial of former national security adviser John Poindexter.

1991: Iraqi officials charged that 130 civilians were killed when British jet fighters raided the town of Fallouja two days earlier.

1991: A Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman downplayed Moscow's initial enthusiasm for an Iraqi offer to withdraw from Kuwait, saying it was insufficient to end the war. 

1992: Two days before the New Hampshire primary, five Democratic presidential candidates debated on CNN, aiming most of their criticism at President Bush.

1992: The chief of the Iranian-financed Hezbollah and two family members were killed in a bombing raid by Israel in an apparent retaliation for attacks against its soldiers.

1993: Prices fell as Wall Street reacted unfavorably to President Clinton's economic austerity plan previewed in a White House address the night before.

1993: Canada's biggest city got a taste of what its next symphony leader will be like. Jukka-Pekka Saraste, who became music director of the Toronto Symphony the following fall, led the orchestra in Brahms' "Haydn" Variations, Bartok's Third Piano Concerto, and Beethoven's Fifth

1994: At least 217 people were killed when a powerful earthquake shook Indonesia's Sumatra island. Figure skaters Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan encountered each other at the Winter Olympic Games in Norway before posing for the US team photograph.

1995: In a dark and defensive address to his nation, Russian President Boris Yeltsin berated his military leaders for big losses and human rights abuses in Chechnya but insisted Russia had to use force to defend its unity.

1996: Eleven people were killed in a fiery collision between an Amtrak passenger train and a Maryland commuter train in Silver Spring, Maryland.

 1996: Former California Governor Edmund G. "Pat" Brown died in Beverly Hills, California, at age 90.

1996: World chess champion Gary Kasparov won for the second time against IBM supercomputer "Deep Blue" in the fifth game of their match in Philadelphia (Kasparov had drawn twice and lost once).

1997: US Representative Dan Burton (Republican, Indiana), the chairman of the House committee investigating campaign fund-raising activities, told NBC's "Meet the Press" that his probe would be far broader than originally anticipated.

1998: A China Airlines Airbus A300-600R trying to land in fog near Taipei, Taiwan, crashed, killing all 196 people on board and six people on the ground.

1998: Skier Hermann Maier of Austria won the Super-G and Katja Seizinger of Germany won the women's downhill at the Nagano Olympics; Russia's Pasha Grishuk and Yeggeny Platov won the ice dancing event.

1998: The United Nations agency UNESCO awarded its $25,000 World Press Freedom Prize to imprisoned Nigerian journalist Christina Anyanwu.

1998: The pioneering American woman war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, third wife of Ernest Hemingway, died in London at the age of 89. 

1999: Enraged Kurds seized embassies and held hostages across Europe following Turkey's arrest of Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan.

1999: Testimony began in the Jasper, Texas trial of John William King, charged with murder in the gruesome dragging death of James Byrd Jr. (King was later convicted and sentenced to death.)

2000: Lucy Edwards, a former Bank of New York executive, and her husband, Peter Berlin, pleaded guilty in federal court in Manhattan to laundering billions of dollars from Russian bankers in one of the biggest such schemes in US history.