1527 ~ Death of Niccolò Machiavelli, Italian Historian & Political Author.

1788 ~ The U.S. Constitution went into effect as New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify it.

1905 ~ Birthday of Jean-Paul Sartre, Philosopher & Playwright, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 1964.

1908 ~ Death of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Russian Composer.

1919 ~ Admiral Ludwig von Reuter scuttled the German fleet in Scapa Flow, Orkney.

1945 ~ The battle for Okinawa ended; 12,520 Americans and 110,000 Japanese were killed in the 83-day campaign.

1964 ~ Three civil rights workers disappeared in Philadelphia, Miss. Their bodies were found buried in an earthen dam six weeks later.

1989 ~ The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that flag burning is protected speech under the Constitution.

2001 ~ Death of Carroll O'Connor, American Actor.

2004 ~ SpaceShipOne became the first privately funded space plane to achieve spaceflight.

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Eudaimonia

1856 ~ Birthday of H. Rider Haggard, Author.

1940 ~ WWII: France forced to sign armistice with Germany.

1941 ~ WWII: Germany invaded the USSR.

1953 ~ Birthday of Cyndi Lauper, singer.

1969 ~ Death of Judy Garland, Singer & Actress.

1976 ~ Canadian House of Commons voted to abolish capital punishment.

1986 ~ Diego Maradona scored both the Hand of God goal and the Goal of the Century against England during the FIFA World Cup in Mexico City.

1987 ~ Death of Fred Astaire, Dancer & Actor.

1996 ~ The Quake computer game was released.

2002 ~ Death of Ann Landers, Columnist.

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Eudaimonia

1894 ~ Birthday of Alfred Kinsey, Sexologist.

1912 ~ Birthday of Alan Turing, Mathematician.

1927 ~ Birthday of Bob Fosse, Choreographer.

1940 ~ Adolf Hitler toured Paris in now occupied France.

1943 ~ Birthday of Vint Cerf, co-designer of the TCP/IP protocols and one of the “Fathers of the Internet".

1947 ~ President Truman's veto of the Taft-Hartley Act overridden.

1956 ~ Gamal Abdel Nasser elected president of Egypt.

1985 ~ An Air India Boeing 747 was blown apart off the coast of Ireland by Sikh extremists.

1993 ~ Lorena Bobbitt sexually mutilated her husband after he allegedly raped her.

1995 ~ Death of Jonas Salk, developer of the Salk polio vaccine.

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1314 ~ Scotland regained its independence in the Battle of Bannockburn, when Scotland's King Robert I defeated the English.

1519 ~ Death of Lucrezia Borgia, duchess of Ferrara.

1692 ~ Kingston, Jamaica founded.

1896 ~ Birthday of Jack Dempsey, Heavyweight boxer.

1901 ~ First exhibition of Pablo Picasso's work.

1910 ~ Japan invaded Korea.

1915 ~ Birthday of Fred Hoyle, cosmologist and science fiction author.

1948 ~ Communist forces cut off all land and water routes between West Germany and West Berlin, prompting the U.S. to organize the Berlin Airlift.

1997 ~ The Roswell Incident debunked by the USAF.

2004 ~ Federal investigators questioned President Bush in connection with the news leak of a CIA operative's name.

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1822 ~ Death of E.T.A. Hoffmann, German Writer, Composer & Painter.

1876 ~ Col. George A. Custer and his 7th Cavalry were wiped out in the Battle of Little Big Horn.

1894 ~ Birthday of Hermann Oberth, Physicist & one of the founding fathers of Rocketry and Astronautics.

1903 ~ Birthday of George Orwell, Writer.

1950 ~ The Korean War began when North Korea invaded South Korea.

1991 ~ Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence from Yugoslavia.

1993 ~ Kim Campbell became the first female Prime Minister of Canada.

1997 ~ An unmanned cargo ship crashed into Russia's Mir space station, knocking out half of the station's power and rupturing a pressurized laboratory.

1997 ~ Death of Jacques-Yves Cousteau, French Explorer, Scientist & Inventor.

1998 ~ The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Line Item Veto Act of 1996 unconstitutional.

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Conspiracy theory says that Jacques Cousteau, kidnapped by the Russians and stashed on Mir, was killed when a CIA controlled resupply craft crashed into the station in a vain attempt to free the living (temporarily) cultural icon. Almost worked too, despite the slight lack of a plan to return him safely to the Calypso. Spooky.

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Calm, quiet, smooth, devastating

Oldfart,

So the CIA was behind THAT as well! You know, I never saw it in that light until now! Thank you!

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Eudaimonia

1541 ~ Death of Francisco Pizarro, Spanish Conqueror of Peru.

1824 ~ Birthday of Lord Kelvin, Physicist.

1898 ~ Birthday of Willy Messerschmitt, Aircraft Designer.

1933 ~ Birthday of Claudio Abbado, Conductor.

1934 ~ Initial flight of the first practical helicopter, the Focke-Wulf 61. You must scroll down a bit through the Hanna Reitsch page to get to the FW-61 entry, but her write up of her experience it is an interesting read.

1959 ~ Queen Elizabeth and President Eisenhower inaugurated the St Lawrence Seaway.

1963 ~ President Kennedy visited West Berlin, where he offered American solidarity to the citizens of West Germany: "Ich bin ein Berliner".

1964 ~ The Beatles released the album A Hard Day's Night.

1996 ~ The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Virginia Military Institute to admit women or forgo state support.

1997 ~ The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Communications Decency Act violated the First Amendment, and thus unconstitutional.

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Eudaimonia

1838 ~ Birthday of Paul von Mauser, Weapon Designer.

1880 ~ Birthday of Helen Keller, spokeswoman for the Deaf and Blind.

1893 ~ Crash of the New York Stock Exchange.

1905 ~ Mutiny on the battleship Potemkin.

1931 ~ Birthday of Charles Bronfman, Industrialist & Philanthropist.

1950 ~ The U.S. decided to send armed forces to fight in the Korean War.

1954 ~ The world's first nuclear power station went on line in Obninsk, near Moscow.

1957 ~ First British Smoking Causes Lung Cancer report released.

1967 ~ The world's first ATM installed in Enfield, London.

2001 ~ Death of Jack Lemmon, Actor & Film Director.

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1577 ~ Birthday of Peter Paul Rubens, Flemish Baroque Painter.

1712 ~ Birthday of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Franco-Swiss Philosopher.

1880 ~ The Australian bushranger Ned Kelly was captured at Glenrowan.

1906 ~ Birthday of Maria Goeppert-Mayer, Physicist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics.

1914 ~ Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria and his wife Sophia were killed by a Serbian nationalist, the casus belli of World War I.

1919 ~ The Treaty of Versailles was signed, ending World War I.

1926 ~ Birthday of Mel Brooks, Filmmaker.

1992 ~ Death of Mikhail Tal, eighth World Chess Champion.

1996 ~ The Citadel voted to admit women, ending a 153-year-old men-only policy at the South Carolina military school.

2004 ~ The U.S.-led coalition transferred sovereignty to the interim Iraqi government.

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1861 ~ Death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Poet. “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways…”

1868 ~ Birthday of George Ellery Hale, Astronomer.

1880 ~ France annexed Tahiti.

1888 ~ First known recording of classical music made, on a wax cylinder.

1895 ~ Death of Thomas Henry Huxley, Scientist. "Darwin's Bulldog"

1922 ~ France granted 1 km² at Vimy Ridge "freely, and for all time, to the Government of Canada, the free use of the land exempt from all taxes".

1963 ~ Birthday of Anne-Sophie Mutter, Violinist.

1974 ~ Isabel Peron is sworn in as first female president for Argentina.

1995 ~ U.S. Space Shuttle Atlantis docked with Russian space station Mir.

2003 ~ Death of Katharine Hepburn, Actress.

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Eudaimonia

1817 ~ Birthday of Joseph Dalton Hooker, Botanist & Champion of Charles Darwin.

1905 ~ During his annus mirabilis, Albert Einstein published the article On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies (PDF) in which he introduced special relativity.

That must have been an exciting period to be a physicist!

1908 ~ Tunguska impact event occurred in Siberia.

1934 ~ Night of the Long Knives, Adolf Hitler's violent purge of his political rivals in Germany took place.

1936 ~ ''Gone with the Wind'' by Margaret Mitchell published.

1943 ~ Birthday of Florence Ballard, American Singer (The Supremes).

1960 ~ Congo gained independence from Belgium.

1971 ~ The crew of the Soyuz 11 spacecraft died when the landing capsule depressurized after separating from the main craft.

1985 ~ Birthday of Mike Tyson, American boxer.

1997 ~ The UK returns sovereignty over Hong Kong to the PRC.

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Eudaimonia

Tunguska, I'd forgotten about that. Still a mega-mystery what blew up above the tundra.

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Calm, quiet, smooth, devastating

1646 ~ Birthday of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, German Mathematician & Philosopher.

1863 ~ The American Civil War battle of Gettysburg began.

1906 ~ Birthday of Estée Lauder, Cosmetics Pioneer.

1916 ~ On the first day of the Battle of the Somme 18,000 British soldiers were killed, and 40,000 wounded.

1925 ~ Death of Erik Satie, French Composer.

1963 ~ The British Government admitted that former diplomat Kim Philby had worked as a Soviet agent.

1980 ~ "O Canada" became the national anthem of Canada.

2000 ~ Death of Walter Matthau, Actor.

2004 ~ Cassini-Huygens was successfully inserted into orbit around Saturn.

2004 ~ Death of Marlon Brando, Actor.

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1714 ~ Birthday of Christoph Willibald Gluck, German Composer.

1906 ~ Birthday of Hans Bethe, German-born Physicist., awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 1967.

1908 ~ Birthday of Thurgood Marshall, U. S. Supreme Court justice.

1937 ~ Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over the Pacific Ocean.

1947 ~ Something the Army Air Force later said was a weather balloon crashed near Roswell, N.M. Eyewitness accounts gave rise to speculation it might have been an alien spacecraft.

1961 ~ Death of Ernest Hemingway, Author, awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature 1954.

1964 ~ President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law a sweeping civil rights bill.

1966 ~ France began nuclear weapons testing at Moruroa in the South Pacific.

1977 ~ Death of Vladimir Nabokov, Russian-born writer.

1982 ~ Larry Walters attached 45 helium balloons to a lawn chair and ascended into history and to a height of 11,000 feet.

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Eudaimonia