January 5
1066 King Edward the Confessor of England (1042-66), dies.
1349 Margaretha of Bavaria names her son Willem V Earl of Holland/Zealand.
1387 Pedro IV, king of Aragon, conqueror of Sicily, dies at 67.
1463 French poet Franois Villon banished from Paris.
1477 Battle of Nancy. Charles the Bold of Burgandy lost his life in defeat at the hands of Swiss. Burgandy became part of France.
1527 Swiss Anabaptist reformer Felix Manz, 29, was drowned in punishment for preaching adult re-baptism. Manz's death made him the first Protestant in history to be martyred at the hands of other Protestants.
1531 Pope Clemens VII forbids English king Henry VIII to re-marry.
1554 Great fire in Eindhoven, Netherlands.
1589 Catherine de Medici of France died at age 69.
1592 Birth of Shah Jahan, also known as Prince Haram, Moghul emperor of India (1628-5
, built Taj Mahal.
1643 In the first record of a legal divorce in the American colonies, Anne Clarke of the Massachusetts Bay Colony is granted a divorce from her absent and adulterous husband, Denis Clarke.
1675 Battle at Turkheim (Colmar), French army beats Brandenburg.
1709 Sudden extreme cold kills thousands of Europeans.
1719 England, Hannover, Saxony-Poland and Austria sign anti-Prussian/Russian pact.
1759 Martha Dandridge Custis marries George Washington.
1779 Birth of Stephen Decatur, U.S. naval officer: "Our country right or wrong."
1781 A British naval expedition led by Benedict Arnold burned Richmond, Va.
1825 23-year-old Alexandre Dumas the Father fights his first duel. He sustains no serious injury, although his pants fall down in the fight. He'll later fill his romantic works, including The Three Musketeers, with duels, battles, and daring escapades.
1836 Davy Crockett arrives in Texas, just in time for the Alamo.
1854 Steamship San Francisco sinks - 300 die.
1855 Birth of King Camp Gillette, the inventor and manufacturer of the safety razor. His invention efforts toward making an invention that everyone would use, by 1895 produced a crude version of a disposable razor blade. On 2 Dec 1901 he patented his idea and founded the Gillette Safety Razor Company in Boston, Mass., to make his razor and blades. In 1904 he sold 90,000 razors and over 12 million blades.
1858 Johann Radetzky von Radetz, Austrian earl and field marshal, dies at 91.
1876 Birth of Konrad Adenauer, chancellor of Germany (1949).
1889 The word hamburger first appeared in print in a Walla Walla, Washington, newspaper - according to the date given in the Oxford English Dictionary. The hamburger was named after a German food called hamburg steak, not because it contains ham, but in the meaning of "from Hamburg." In the 19th century, German immigrants migrated to North America bringing along the recipe for the hamburg steak, a form of pounded beef. American people adopted the hamburg steak but used the adjective form "hamburger" without "steak" at the end. By 1902, the first description of a hamburg steak close to the American conception of the hamburger, gave a recipe calling for ground beef mixed with onion and pepper.
1895 French Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, condemned for passing military secrets to the Germans and treason, was publicly stripped of his rank. The Jewish artillery captain, convicted on flimsy evidence in a highly irregular trial, began his life sentence on the notorious Devil's Island Prison in French Guyana four months later.
1896 Austrian newspaper "Wiener Presse" reported the discovery by German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen of a type of radiation that came to be known as ``X-rays.''
1903 The general public could use the Pacific cable for the very first time.
1904 Death of Karl Alfred von Zittel, paleontologist who proved that the Sahara had not been under water during the Pleistocene Ice Age. A distinguished authority on his subjects and their history, he was a pioneer of evolutionary paleontology and was widely recognized as the leading teacher of paleontology in the 19th century.
1906 birth of Dame Kathleen Kenyon, English archaeologist who excavated Jericho to its Stone Age foundation and showed it to be the oldest known continuously occupied human settlement. She established for the first time a historic framework for the city over its 3,800 years of existance. Over 100 tombs were discovered at Jericho during excavations (1952-5 .
1908 Death of Joseph von Mering, German physician, physiologist, pharmacologist, and experimental pathologist. His discovery (with Oskar Minkowski) that removing the pancreas from dogs produces the symptoms of diabetes led to the discovery that insulin, synthesized in the pancreas, is a hormone important to the body's utilization of sugar.
1909 Birth of Stephen Cole Kleene, American mathematician and logician whose work on recursion theory helped lay the foundations of theoretical computer science.
1909 Colombia recognizes Panama's independence
1915 British blockade of Germany begins.
1916 Austria-Hungary begins offensive against Montenegro.
1916 Italian armed merchant ship Brindisi sinks off Albanian coast by a mine. The ship was carrying south-Slavic volunteers from Canada amd US who wanted to join the Serbian Army in WW I. 309 people drowned while 102 survived.
1919 National Socialist Party (Nazi) forms as German Farmers Party.
1923 Sam Phillips, founder of Sun Records born in Alabama.
1924 Walter Chrylser, a General Motors executive who had pioneered the introduction of all-steel bodies in automobiles (instead of wood), introduced his first motorcar.
1925 Nellie T. Ross succeeded her late husband as governor of Wyoming, becoming the first female governor in U.S. history.
1928 Birth of Zulfikar Ali Khan Bhutto, President (1971-73) and Premier (1973-77) of Pakistan.
1933 The 30th president of the United States, Calvin Coolidge, died in Northampton, Mass., at age 60.
1933 What is now a symbol of the great American West, the Golden Gate Bridge, went under construction. It would be called an engineering marvel when completed. Spanning the deep channel at the entrance to San Francisco Bay, with the Bay on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other, few people-made things are as beautiful as the Golden Gate Bridge.
1938 Birth of Juan Carlos I, king of Spain (1975- )
1940 Finnish offensive at Suomossalmi against Russia.
1941 Death of Amy Johnson, pioneering British female aviator who first achieved fame as a result of her attempt (1930) to set a record for solo flight from London to Darwin, Australia, although she missed that record by three days. She took up flying in 1928, and also showed talent for mechanics. By 1930 she had qualified as both a pilot and a ground engineer. Flying a De Havilland Moth, Johnson set out to beat Bert Hinkler's record for flying to Australia. Though she did not beat the record, she made it to Australia, and was given a hero's welcome. She was the first woman to make the trip. The Daily Mail gave her a 10,000 prize. Johnson made other long-distance flights. While on a flying mission for the Air Ministry, 5 Jan 1941, she disappeared over the Thames estuary.
1942 Bulgaria takes over the occupational duties in southeast Serbia to relieve German troops.
1943 Educator and scientist George Washington Carver died in Tuskegee, Ala., at age 81.
1945 On the eve of a major offensive into Poland, the Soviet Union decides to recognize the pro-Soviet Lublin Committee as the Provisional Government of Poland instead of the government-in-exile that was temporarily being headquartered in London. On September 1, 1939, a massive German army invaded Poland. Sixteen days later, the USSR invaded Poland from the east. During this tumultuous period, Gen. Wladyslaw Sikorski became leader of a Polish government-in-exile in London. He developed a good working relationship with the Allies until April 1943, when Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin broke off Polish-Soviet diplomatic relations after Sikorski requested that the Red Cross investigate the alleged Soviet slaughter of Polish officers in the Katyn forest of eastern Poland in 1942. As the war progressed and the Soviets battled the Germans in western Poland, the Polish government-in-exile began to fear that Soviet domination might follow if the Soviets defeated Germany for control of the Polish territory. Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, Sikorski's successor as the provisional government head, pleaded with the Allies to secure Poland's postwar borders and sovereignty, but no such assurances were granted. In August 1944, the Polish Home Army, fearful that the Soviets would march on Warsaw to battle the Germans and never leave the capital, led an uprising against the German occupiers. They hoped that if they could defeat the Germans, the Allies would help install the anti-Communist government-in-exile after the war. Unfortunately, the Soviets, rather than aiding the uprising that they encouraged in the name of beating back their common enemy, stood idly by and watched as the Germans slaughtered the Poles and sent survivors to concentration camps. With native Polish resistance eradicated, and in anticipation of one last offensive against the Germans, the Soviet Union created its own pro-communist Polish provisional government to counter the anti-communist government-in-exile. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Allies agreed that an interim government would be formed from both the pro- and anti-communist sides, with free elections to follow. The Soviets had other plans, though, and promptly turned the exhausted and battered Poland into a nondemocratic satellite country, which it remained until 1989.
1948 Warner Brothers-Pathe showed the very first colour newsreel, as pictures of the Tournament of Roses Parade taken New Years Day and the Rose Bowl football classic were seen by theatre audiences. It was made using the Cinecolor process.
1949 In his State of the Union address, President Truman labeled his administration the "Fair Deal."
1956 Elvis Presley records "Heartbreak Hotel".
1957 In response to the increasingly tense situation in the Middle East, President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivers a proposal to Congress that calls for a new and more proactive U.S. policy in the region. The "Eisenhower Doctrine," as the proposal soon came to be known, established the Middle East as a Cold War battlefield.
1959 Coral Records releases "It Doesn't Matter Anymore" by Buddy Holly. The record was Holly's last before his tragic death in a plane crash that also killed singers Ritchie Valens and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson.
1964 Following an unprecedented pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Pope Paul VI met with Greek Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I in Jerusalem. It was the first such meeting between leaders of the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Churches in over 500 years (since 1439).
1967 1st Battalion, 9th U.S. Marines and South Vietnamese Marine Brigade Force Bravo conduct amphibious operations in the Kien Hoa Province in the Mekong Delta, located 62 miles south of Saigon. This action, part of Operation Deckhouse V, marked the first time that U.S. combat troops were used in the Mekong Delta.
1968 Antonn Novotn, the Stalinist ruler of Czechoslovakia, is succeeded as first secretary by Alexander Dubcek, a Slovak who supports liberal reforms. In the first few months of his rule, Dubcek introduced a series of far-reaching political and economic reforms, including increased freedom of speech and the rehabilitation of political dissidents. Dubcek's effort to establish "communism with a human face" was celebrated across the country, and the brief period of freedom became known as the "Prague Spring." On August 20, 1968, the Soviet Union answered Dubcek's reforms with invasion of Czechoslovakia by 600,000 Warsaw Pact troops. Prague was not eager to give way, but scattered student resistance was no match for Soviet tanks. Dubcek's reforms were repealed, and the leader himself was replaced with the staunchly pro-Soviet Gustav Husak, who re-established an authoritarian Communist regime in the country. In 1989, as Communist governments folded across Eastern Europe, Prague again became the scene of demonstrations for democratic reforms. In December 1989, Husak's government conceded to demands for a multiparty Parliament. Husak resigned, and for the first time in two decades Dubcek returned to politics as chairman of the new Parliament, which subsequently elected playwright Vaclav Havel as president of Czechoslovakia. Havel had come to fame during the Prague Spring, and after the Soviet crackdown his plays were banned and his passport confiscated.
1969 President-elect Richard Nixon names Henry Cabot Lodge to succeed W. Averell Harriman as chief U.S. negotiator at the Paris peace talks. Unfortunately, the change in personnel had no effect in fostering more meaningful negotiations.
1970 Joseph A. Yablonski, an unsuccessful candidate for the presidency of the United Mine Workers of America, was found murdered with his wife and daughter at their Clarksville, Pa., home. UMWA President Anthony Boyle and three others were convicted of the murders.
1970 Death of Max Born, German physicist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1954, with Walther Bothe of Germany, for his statistical formulation of the behaviour of subatomic particles. His studies of the wave function led to the replacement of the original quantum theory, which regarded electrons as particles, with a mathematical description.
1972 President Richard M. Nixon announced that NASA would proceed with the development of a reusable low cost space shuttle system. He signed a $5.5 billion dollar bill for its creation.
1973 Netherlands recognizes German Democratic Republic (East Germany).
1981 Death of Harold C. Urey, American scientist awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1934 for his discovery of deuterium, the heavy form of hydrogen (1932). He was a key figure in the development of the atomic bomb. He made fundamental contributions to a widely accepted theory of the origin of the Earth and other planets. In 1953, Stanley L. Miller and Urey simulated the effect of lightning in the prebiotic atmosphere of Earth with an electrical discharge in a mixture of hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and water. This produced a rich mixture of aldehydes and carboxylic and amino acids (as found in proteins, adenine and other nucleic acid bases). Urey calculated the temperature of ancient oceans from the amount of certain isotopes in fossil shells.
1976 Cambodia is renamed Democratic Kampuchea.
1982 Arkansas judge rules against obligatory teaching of creation.
1983 President Reagan announced he was nominating Elizabeth Dole to succeed Drew Lewis as secretary of transportation. Dole became the first woman to head a Cabinet department in Reagan's administration, and the first to head the DOT.
1994 Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill, former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, died in Boston at age 81.
1993 The state of Washington executed Westley Allan Dodd, an admitted child sex killer, in America's first legal hanging since 1965.
1993 A Liberian-registered tanker Braer ran aground in Scotland's Shetland Islands, spilling more than 24 million gallons of light crude oil.
1996 Israeli secret services used an exploding cellphone to kill Palestinian extremist Yahya Ayash, known as the "Engineer," whom they blamed for a series of bombings.
1997 Death of Vero Wynne-Edwards, British zoologist who espoused a theory of evolution known as group selection, the view that animals behave altruistically to control population growth. In his book Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behavior (1962), he argued that instead of operating solely through Darwinian individual survival of the fittest, evolution also occurs by self-regulatory mechanisms of whole species, manifested in territoriality, dominance hierarchies, and allocation of resources. He postulated that evolution often favours not the animal best able to survive alone, but rather the animal best adapted to survive within the social context of the kind.
1997 Russia withdrew its forces from Chechnya.
1998 Sonny Bono, the 1960's pop star-turned-politician, was killed when he struck a tree while skiing in South Lake Tahoe, Calif.; he was 62.
1998 Ice storm knocks out electricity in Qubec and Ontario.
1998 Vandals decapitate Copenhagen's Little Mermaid.
2002 Charles Bishop, a 15-year-old student pilot, deliberately crashed a small plane into a skyscraper in Tampa, Fla., killing himself.
2002 Italy's foreign minister, Renato Ruggiero, resigned after a spat with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi over the government's lukewarm reception of the euro.
1066 King Edward the Confessor of England (1042-66), dies.
1349 Margaretha of Bavaria names her son Willem V Earl of Holland/Zealand.
1387 Pedro IV, king of Aragon, conqueror of Sicily, dies at 67.
1463 French poet Franois Villon banished from Paris.
1477 Battle of Nancy. Charles the Bold of Burgandy lost his life in defeat at the hands of Swiss. Burgandy became part of France.
1527 Swiss Anabaptist reformer Felix Manz, 29, was drowned in punishment for preaching adult re-baptism. Manz's death made him the first Protestant in history to be martyred at the hands of other Protestants.
1531 Pope Clemens VII forbids English king Henry VIII to re-marry.
1554 Great fire in Eindhoven, Netherlands.
1589 Catherine de Medici of France died at age 69.
1592 Birth of Shah Jahan, also known as Prince Haram, Moghul emperor of India (1628-5
, built Taj Mahal.1643 In the first record of a legal divorce in the American colonies, Anne Clarke of the Massachusetts Bay Colony is granted a divorce from her absent and adulterous husband, Denis Clarke.
1675 Battle at Turkheim (Colmar), French army beats Brandenburg.
1709 Sudden extreme cold kills thousands of Europeans.
1719 England, Hannover, Saxony-Poland and Austria sign anti-Prussian/Russian pact.
1759 Martha Dandridge Custis marries George Washington.
1779 Birth of Stephen Decatur, U.S. naval officer: "Our country right or wrong."
1781 A British naval expedition led by Benedict Arnold burned Richmond, Va.
1825 23-year-old Alexandre Dumas the Father fights his first duel. He sustains no serious injury, although his pants fall down in the fight. He'll later fill his romantic works, including The Three Musketeers, with duels, battles, and daring escapades.
1836 Davy Crockett arrives in Texas, just in time for the Alamo.
1854 Steamship San Francisco sinks - 300 die.
1855 Birth of King Camp Gillette, the inventor and manufacturer of the safety razor. His invention efforts toward making an invention that everyone would use, by 1895 produced a crude version of a disposable razor blade. On 2 Dec 1901 he patented his idea and founded the Gillette Safety Razor Company in Boston, Mass., to make his razor and blades. In 1904 he sold 90,000 razors and over 12 million blades.
1858 Johann Radetzky von Radetz, Austrian earl and field marshal, dies at 91.
1876 Birth of Konrad Adenauer, chancellor of Germany (1949).
1889 The word hamburger first appeared in print in a Walla Walla, Washington, newspaper - according to the date given in the Oxford English Dictionary. The hamburger was named after a German food called hamburg steak, not because it contains ham, but in the meaning of "from Hamburg." In the 19th century, German immigrants migrated to North America bringing along the recipe for the hamburg steak, a form of pounded beef. American people adopted the hamburg steak but used the adjective form "hamburger" without "steak" at the end. By 1902, the first description of a hamburg steak close to the American conception of the hamburger, gave a recipe calling for ground beef mixed with onion and pepper.
1895 French Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, condemned for passing military secrets to the Germans and treason, was publicly stripped of his rank. The Jewish artillery captain, convicted on flimsy evidence in a highly irregular trial, began his life sentence on the notorious Devil's Island Prison in French Guyana four months later.
1896 Austrian newspaper "Wiener Presse" reported the discovery by German physicist Wilhelm Roentgen of a type of radiation that came to be known as ``X-rays.''
1903 The general public could use the Pacific cable for the very first time.
1904 Death of Karl Alfred von Zittel, paleontologist who proved that the Sahara had not been under water during the Pleistocene Ice Age. A distinguished authority on his subjects and their history, he was a pioneer of evolutionary paleontology and was widely recognized as the leading teacher of paleontology in the 19th century.
1906 birth of Dame Kathleen Kenyon, English archaeologist who excavated Jericho to its Stone Age foundation and showed it to be the oldest known continuously occupied human settlement. She established for the first time a historic framework for the city over its 3,800 years of existance. Over 100 tombs were discovered at Jericho during excavations (1952-5
.1908 Death of Joseph von Mering, German physician, physiologist, pharmacologist, and experimental pathologist. His discovery (with Oskar Minkowski) that removing the pancreas from dogs produces the symptoms of diabetes led to the discovery that insulin, synthesized in the pancreas, is a hormone important to the body's utilization of sugar.
1909 Birth of Stephen Cole Kleene, American mathematician and logician whose work on recursion theory helped lay the foundations of theoretical computer science.
1909 Colombia recognizes Panama's independence
1915 British blockade of Germany begins.
1916 Austria-Hungary begins offensive against Montenegro.
1916 Italian armed merchant ship Brindisi sinks off Albanian coast by a mine. The ship was carrying south-Slavic volunteers from Canada amd US who wanted to join the Serbian Army in WW I. 309 people drowned while 102 survived.
1919 National Socialist Party (Nazi) forms as German Farmers Party.
1923 Sam Phillips, founder of Sun Records born in Alabama.
1924 Walter Chrylser, a General Motors executive who had pioneered the introduction of all-steel bodies in automobiles (instead of wood), introduced his first motorcar.
1925 Nellie T. Ross succeeded her late husband as governor of Wyoming, becoming the first female governor in U.S. history.
1928 Birth of Zulfikar Ali Khan Bhutto, President (1971-73) and Premier (1973-77) of Pakistan.
1933 The 30th president of the United States, Calvin Coolidge, died in Northampton, Mass., at age 60.
1933 What is now a symbol of the great American West, the Golden Gate Bridge, went under construction. It would be called an engineering marvel when completed. Spanning the deep channel at the entrance to San Francisco Bay, with the Bay on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other, few people-made things are as beautiful as the Golden Gate Bridge.
1938 Birth of Juan Carlos I, king of Spain (1975- )
1940 Finnish offensive at Suomossalmi against Russia.
1941 Death of Amy Johnson, pioneering British female aviator who first achieved fame as a result of her attempt (1930) to set a record for solo flight from London to Darwin, Australia, although she missed that record by three days. She took up flying in 1928, and also showed talent for mechanics. By 1930 she had qualified as both a pilot and a ground engineer. Flying a De Havilland Moth, Johnson set out to beat Bert Hinkler's record for flying to Australia. Though she did not beat the record, she made it to Australia, and was given a hero's welcome. She was the first woman to make the trip. The Daily Mail gave her a 10,000 prize. Johnson made other long-distance flights. While on a flying mission for the Air Ministry, 5 Jan 1941, she disappeared over the Thames estuary.
1942 Bulgaria takes over the occupational duties in southeast Serbia to relieve German troops.
1943 Educator and scientist George Washington Carver died in Tuskegee, Ala., at age 81.
1945 On the eve of a major offensive into Poland, the Soviet Union decides to recognize the pro-Soviet Lublin Committee as the Provisional Government of Poland instead of the government-in-exile that was temporarily being headquartered in London. On September 1, 1939, a massive German army invaded Poland. Sixteen days later, the USSR invaded Poland from the east. During this tumultuous period, Gen. Wladyslaw Sikorski became leader of a Polish government-in-exile in London. He developed a good working relationship with the Allies until April 1943, when Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin broke off Polish-Soviet diplomatic relations after Sikorski requested that the Red Cross investigate the alleged Soviet slaughter of Polish officers in the Katyn forest of eastern Poland in 1942. As the war progressed and the Soviets battled the Germans in western Poland, the Polish government-in-exile began to fear that Soviet domination might follow if the Soviets defeated Germany for control of the Polish territory. Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, Sikorski's successor as the provisional government head, pleaded with the Allies to secure Poland's postwar borders and sovereignty, but no such assurances were granted. In August 1944, the Polish Home Army, fearful that the Soviets would march on Warsaw to battle the Germans and never leave the capital, led an uprising against the German occupiers. They hoped that if they could defeat the Germans, the Allies would help install the anti-Communist government-in-exile after the war. Unfortunately, the Soviets, rather than aiding the uprising that they encouraged in the name of beating back their common enemy, stood idly by and watched as the Germans slaughtered the Poles and sent survivors to concentration camps. With native Polish resistance eradicated, and in anticipation of one last offensive against the Germans, the Soviet Union created its own pro-communist Polish provisional government to counter the anti-communist government-in-exile. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945, the Allies agreed that an interim government would be formed from both the pro- and anti-communist sides, with free elections to follow. The Soviets had other plans, though, and promptly turned the exhausted and battered Poland into a nondemocratic satellite country, which it remained until 1989.
1948 Warner Brothers-Pathe showed the very first colour newsreel, as pictures of the Tournament of Roses Parade taken New Years Day and the Rose Bowl football classic were seen by theatre audiences. It was made using the Cinecolor process.
1949 In his State of the Union address, President Truman labeled his administration the "Fair Deal."
1956 Elvis Presley records "Heartbreak Hotel".
1957 In response to the increasingly tense situation in the Middle East, President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivers a proposal to Congress that calls for a new and more proactive U.S. policy in the region. The "Eisenhower Doctrine," as the proposal soon came to be known, established the Middle East as a Cold War battlefield.
1959 Coral Records releases "It Doesn't Matter Anymore" by Buddy Holly. The record was Holly's last before his tragic death in a plane crash that also killed singers Ritchie Valens and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson.
1964 Following an unprecedented pilgrimage to the Holy Land, Pope Paul VI met with Greek Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I in Jerusalem. It was the first such meeting between leaders of the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Churches in over 500 years (since 1439).
1967 1st Battalion, 9th U.S. Marines and South Vietnamese Marine Brigade Force Bravo conduct amphibious operations in the Kien Hoa Province in the Mekong Delta, located 62 miles south of Saigon. This action, part of Operation Deckhouse V, marked the first time that U.S. combat troops were used in the Mekong Delta.
1968 Antonn Novotn, the Stalinist ruler of Czechoslovakia, is succeeded as first secretary by Alexander Dubcek, a Slovak who supports liberal reforms. In the first few months of his rule, Dubcek introduced a series of far-reaching political and economic reforms, including increased freedom of speech and the rehabilitation of political dissidents. Dubcek's effort to establish "communism with a human face" was celebrated across the country, and the brief period of freedom became known as the "Prague Spring." On August 20, 1968, the Soviet Union answered Dubcek's reforms with invasion of Czechoslovakia by 600,000 Warsaw Pact troops. Prague was not eager to give way, but scattered student resistance was no match for Soviet tanks. Dubcek's reforms were repealed, and the leader himself was replaced with the staunchly pro-Soviet Gustav Husak, who re-established an authoritarian Communist regime in the country. In 1989, as Communist governments folded across Eastern Europe, Prague again became the scene of demonstrations for democratic reforms. In December 1989, Husak's government conceded to demands for a multiparty Parliament. Husak resigned, and for the first time in two decades Dubcek returned to politics as chairman of the new Parliament, which subsequently elected playwright Vaclav Havel as president of Czechoslovakia. Havel had come to fame during the Prague Spring, and after the Soviet crackdown his plays were banned and his passport confiscated.
1969 President-elect Richard Nixon names Henry Cabot Lodge to succeed W. Averell Harriman as chief U.S. negotiator at the Paris peace talks. Unfortunately, the change in personnel had no effect in fostering more meaningful negotiations.
1970 Joseph A. Yablonski, an unsuccessful candidate for the presidency of the United Mine Workers of America, was found murdered with his wife and daughter at their Clarksville, Pa., home. UMWA President Anthony Boyle and three others were convicted of the murders.
1970 Death of Max Born, German physicist, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1954, with Walther Bothe of Germany, for his statistical formulation of the behaviour of subatomic particles. His studies of the wave function led to the replacement of the original quantum theory, which regarded electrons as particles, with a mathematical description.
1972 President Richard M. Nixon announced that NASA would proceed with the development of a reusable low cost space shuttle system. He signed a $5.5 billion dollar bill for its creation.
1973 Netherlands recognizes German Democratic Republic (East Germany).
1981 Death of Harold C. Urey, American scientist awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1934 for his discovery of deuterium, the heavy form of hydrogen (1932). He was a key figure in the development of the atomic bomb. He made fundamental contributions to a widely accepted theory of the origin of the Earth and other planets. In 1953, Stanley L. Miller and Urey simulated the effect of lightning in the prebiotic atmosphere of Earth with an electrical discharge in a mixture of hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and water. This produced a rich mixture of aldehydes and carboxylic and amino acids (as found in proteins, adenine and other nucleic acid bases). Urey calculated the temperature of ancient oceans from the amount of certain isotopes in fossil shells.
1976 Cambodia is renamed Democratic Kampuchea.
1982 Arkansas judge rules against obligatory teaching of creation.
1983 President Reagan announced he was nominating Elizabeth Dole to succeed Drew Lewis as secretary of transportation. Dole became the first woman to head a Cabinet department in Reagan's administration, and the first to head the DOT.
1994 Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill, former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, died in Boston at age 81.
1993 The state of Washington executed Westley Allan Dodd, an admitted child sex killer, in America's first legal hanging since 1965.
1993 A Liberian-registered tanker Braer ran aground in Scotland's Shetland Islands, spilling more than 24 million gallons of light crude oil.
1996 Israeli secret services used an exploding cellphone to kill Palestinian extremist Yahya Ayash, known as the "Engineer," whom they blamed for a series of bombings.
1997 Death of Vero Wynne-Edwards, British zoologist who espoused a theory of evolution known as group selection, the view that animals behave altruistically to control population growth. In his book Animal Dispersion in Relation to Social Behavior (1962), he argued that instead of operating solely through Darwinian individual survival of the fittest, evolution also occurs by self-regulatory mechanisms of whole species, manifested in territoriality, dominance hierarchies, and allocation of resources. He postulated that evolution often favours not the animal best able to survive alone, but rather the animal best adapted to survive within the social context of the kind.
1997 Russia withdrew its forces from Chechnya.
1998 Sonny Bono, the 1960's pop star-turned-politician, was killed when he struck a tree while skiing in South Lake Tahoe, Calif.; he was 62.
1998 Ice storm knocks out electricity in Qubec and Ontario.
1998 Vandals decapitate Copenhagen's Little Mermaid.
2002 Charles Bishop, a 15-year-old student pilot, deliberately crashed a small plane into a skyscraper in Tampa, Fla., killing himself.
2002 Italy's foreign minister, Renato Ruggiero, resigned after a spat with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi over the government's lukewarm reception of the euro.
Mad Hatter