1800: The inventor Charles Goodyear is born; he later discovers the vulcanisation of rubber and invents ebonite.
1862: The bowling ball is invented.
1890: The 7th Cavalry of the United States kills 400 men, women, and children at Wounded Knee Creek. This marks the last major battle between Native Americans and US forces, during which the Sioux leader “Big Foot” is also killed.
1911: Turkestan declares independence from China and comes under Russian influence.
1916: Grigori Rasputin, the monk with enormous influence over the Russian imperial court, especially Tsarina Alexandra, is assassinated in Saint Petersburg.
1919: The League of Greek Socialist Women calls a meeting for women in Athens and Piraeus to discuss the issue of women’s suffrage.
1924: Peter Pan appears on the big screen for the first time in the silent film by Herbert Brenon.
1937: The Irish Free State is replaced by a new state called Ireland with the adoption of a new Constitution.
1937: Actor, director, and screenwriter Anthony Hopkins is born.
1940: German fighter planes bomb London, causing the most devastating fires since 1666.
1946: Singer Marianne Faithfull is born.
1951: The United States begins generating electricity using nuclear power.
1952: The first hearing aid based on a transistorised crystal amplifier is released.
1953: Greece adopts the kilogram instead of the oka and the metre instead of the cubit.
1958: OPAP (Greek Organisation of Football Prognostics) is established under Royal Decree 20.
1959: Physicist Richard Phillips Feynman delivers a lecture titled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” considered the birth of nanotechnology.
1972: British actor Jude Law is born.
1981: US President Ronald Reagan announces economic sanctions against the USSR due to its role in imposing martial law in Poland.
1986: Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky dies.
1989: Václav Havel becomes the first non-Communist President of Czechoslovakia.
1992: German author Günter Grass resigns from the Social Democrats in protest at their position on restricting asylum for foreigners.
2006: Greek writer and journalist Marios Ploritis dies.
2009: Serbia’s Minister of Labour and Social Relations, Rasim Ljajić, resigns for failing to fulfil his promise to locate Ratko Mladić by the end of 2009.
2014: Elections are announced in Greece after the Parliament fails to elect a President.
This article was originally published on Polignosi.