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

0364: Death of the Emperor Jovian of Rome

0603: Death of St. Fintan of Cloneenagh

0661: Death of St. Finan

1247: Death of Henry Raspe, King of Germany

1312: A Royal Embassy arrives in Vienne from Philip IV "the Fair," King of France, to convince the Pope to condemn the Templars

1317: The French Inquisition is set after the Spirituals

1387: "Heathen" religions banned in Poland

1400: Richard, deposed King of England, murdered

1454: Philip "the Good," of Burgundy, takes the Vow of the Pheasant

1568: Holy Roman Emperor agrees to pay annual tribute to Sultan for peace

1621: Miles Standish appointed Military Commander of Plymouth Colony

1673: Moliere, the stage name of French playwright and actor Jean-Baptiste Poquelin died after collapsing on stage on the third night of his play "Le Malade Imaginaire" ("The Imaginary Invalid").

1801: The House of Representatives chose Thomas Jefferson as third president of the United States. Aaron Burr, who tied with Jefferson in the Electoral College, became vice president.

1817: Baltimore became the first U.S. city with gas-burning street lights.

1864: Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley sinks the USS Housatonic in Charleston Harbor, S.C.1865: Columbia, South Carolina, burned as the Confederates evacuated and Union forces moved in. Even today it is not known which side set the blaze.

1876: Julius Wolff was credited with being the first to can sardines - at Eastport, Maine.

1897: The forerunner of the National PTA, the National Congress of Mothers, was founded in Washington.

1904: Puccini's "Madame Butterfly" was premiered at La Scala. It received a poor reception!

1909: Apache leader Geronimo died while under military confinement at Fort Sill, Oklahoma

1909: A government commission reports that the tobacco industry is controlled by six men with 86 firms that are worth $450 million.

1919: Germany signs an armistice giving up territory in Poland.

1924: Swimmer (and later "Tarzan") Johnny Weissmuller set a world record in the 100-yard freestyle. His time: 52-2/5 seconds in Miami, Florida.

1933: "Newsweek" was first published.

1933: The League of Nations censures Japan in a worldwide broadcast. The rise of militaristic nationalism led Japan down the road to Pearl Harbor and World War II.

1933: "Blondie Boopadoop," the title role and flapper in the comic strip "Blondie," married "Dagwood Bumstead." The marriage took place three years after the popular comic strip debuted in the nation's newspapers.

1934: The first high school automobile driver's education course was introduced in State College, Pennsylvania.

1935: Thirty-one prisoners escape an Oklahoma prison after murdering a guard.

1944: Oil is discovered in commercial quantities in Alabama.

1945: Gen. MacArthur’s troops land on Corregidor in the Philippines. General Tomoyuki Yamashita was the Japanese general opposing MacArthur.

1947: The Voice of America began broadcasting to the Soviet Union.

1951: The Packard convertible makes its debut.

1955: Britain announces its ability to make hydrogen bombs.

1958: Former New York Giants football star, Frank Gifford, signed a seven-year contract with Warner Brothers. When the movie career did not work out, he worked at WCBS-TV as a sportscaster.

1959: The U.S. launches its first weather station in space, Vanguard II.

1960: Martin Luther King Jr. is arrested in the Alabama bus boycott.

1963: Soviet leader Khrushchev visits the Berlin Wall.

1964: The Supreme Court issued its "Westberry v. Sanders" decision, ruling congressional districts within each state had to be roughly equal in population.

1964: Luke Appling became the 101st member elected to baseball's Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

1968: The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame opened in Springfield, Massachusetts.

1972: President Nixon departed on his historic trip to China.

1972: Pink Floyd premiered "Dark Side of the Moon" during a concert at London's Rainbow Theater. The album by that name was released a year later and became the longest-charting Rock LP in Billboard's history. 303 weeks.

1973: President Richard Nixon names Patrick Gray director of the FBI.

1975: Art in by Cezanne, Gauguin, Renoir, and van Gough, valued at $5 million, is stolen from the Municipal Museum in Milan.

1986: Johnson and Johnson halted production of all non-prescription drugs in capsules following the death of a Peekskill, N,Y., woman from cyanide-laced Extra-Strength Tylenol.

1981: Pope John Paul II meets with President Marcos in Manila.

1982: U.S. jazz pianist Thelonius Monk died. A key figure in the development of bebop, he played with Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane.

1983: Sen. Gary Hart of Colorado announced in Denver he would seek the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination.

1983: General Motors Corp. and Toyota Motor Corp. officials signed an agreement to build front-wheel-drive cars at an idled GM plant in Fremont, California.

1985: Murray Haydon becomes the third person to receive an artificial heart as doctors at Humana Hospital Audubon in Louisville, Kentucky, implanted the device. (Haydon lived 488 days with the heart.)

1985: The price of first class U.S. postage stamps were raised to 22 cents.

1986: Johnson & Johnson pulled Tylenol from store shelves after a woman died from taking the pain reliever. It was later found that the medication had been tampered with.

1987: Don Mattingly won the highest award in the 13-year history of salary arbitration when a judge ruled that the New York Yankee deserved a salary of $1,975,000.

1988: Lieutenant Colonel William Higgins, an American officer serving with a United Nations truce monitoring group, was kidnapped in southern Lebanon (he was later slain by his captors).

1989: Iran's president (Ali Khamenei) said Salman Rushdie, author of "The Satanic Verses," could save himself from a death sentence pronounced by Ayatollah Khomeini if he were to apologize for his book, which was regarded as blasphemous.

1990: Former President Reagan spent a second day in a Los Angeles courtroom, giving videotaped testimony about the Iran-Contra affair for the trial of his former national security adviser, John Poindexter.

1990: Czechoslovakia's Communist Party expelled former President Gustav Huak, ex-Prime Minister Lubomir Strougal and 20 other hard-liners who came to power after Soviet tanks crushed the 1968 Prague Spring reform era.

1991: During the Persian Gulf War, Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz traveled to Moscow for a meeting with Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

1992: Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was sentenced in Milwaukee to life in prison He was beaten to death in prison in November 1994.

1992: Secretary of State James A. Baker III met with Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin in Moscow, after which Baker announced plans to aid former Soviet nuclear scientists and help Russian dismantle it nuclear weapons.

1993: An overcrowded ferry carrying up to 1,500 people sank off Haiti; only 285 people were known to have survived.

1993: President Clinton addressed a joint session of Congress, asking Americans to accept one of the biggest tax increases in history as part of a plan to curb massive budget deficits and stimulate the economy.

1993: The New York Philharmonic performed the suite from "The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh," by Rimsky-Korsakov. Russian guest-conductor Valery Gergiev also conducted selections from the Berlioz version of "Romeo and Juliet".

1994: Bosnian Serbs began large-scale withdrawal of its heavy guns from the hills around Sarajevo under pressure from Russia.

1994: The U.S. government reported a record trade deficit with Japan the previous year; Japan, faced with possible U.S. sanctions, decided to develop a wide-ranging package of measures to trim its trade surplus with the U.S.

1995: Colin Ferguson was convicted of six counts of murder in the December 1993 Long Island Rail Road shootings. He was later sentenced to a minimum of 200 years in prison.

1995: Ecuador and Peru signed a peace accord aimed at ending their three-week border war.

1996: World chess champion Garry Kasparov beat IBM supercomputer "Deep Blue," winning a six-game match in Philadelphia (Kasparov had lost the first game, won the second, fifth and sixth games and earned draws in the third and fourth).

1996: Tidal waves killed more than 100 people in Indonesia.

1997: a surprising development, Pepperdine University said that Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr would step down from the probe to take a full-time job at the school. (Starr reversed himself four days later.)

1998: President Clinton, preparing Americans for possible airstrikes against Iraq, said military force is never the first answer "but sometimes it's the only answer."

1998: A jury in Fort Worth, Texas, convicted former Naval Academy midshipman Diane Zamora of killing a 16-year-old romantic rival. 1998: An Iranian crowd cheered as US wrestlers carried the Stars and Stripes into an international meet in Tehran.

1998: The US women's hockey team won the gold medal at Nagano, defeating Canada 3-to-1.

1999: Israeli security guards shot and killed three Kurds who had forced their way into the Israeli consulate in Berlin; the protesters were enraged by reports that Israel aided in the arrest of Kurdish rebel leader Abdullah Ocalan.

1999: In a satellite-linked address to college campuses across the country, President Clinton made his case for shoring up Social Security and Medicare.

2000: A House panel said in a report that the program to inoculate all 2.4 million American military personnel against anthrax was based on "a paucity of science" and should be suspended; the Pentagon defended the program and vowed to continue the inoculations.