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Events

307 - After divorcing his wife Minervina, Constantine marries Fausta, the daughter of the retired Roman Emperor Maximian.

1717 - A sermon on "The Nature of the Kingdom of Christ" by Benjamin Hoadly, the Bishop of Bangor, provoked the Bangorian Controversy.

1774 - American Revolutionary War: The Kingdom of Great Britain orders the port of Boston, Massachusetts closed in the Boston Port Act.

1854 - Commodore Matthew Perry signs the Treaty of Kanagawa with the Japanese government, opening the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate to American trade.

1866 - The Spanish Navy bombs the harbour of Valparaíso, Chile..

1885 - The United Kingdom establishes a protectorate over Bechuanaland.

1889 - The Eiffel Tower is inaugurated.

1906 - The Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (later National Collegiate Athletic Association) is established to set rules for amateur sports in the United States.

1909 - Serbia accepts Austrian control over Bosnia-Herzegovina.

1917 - The United States takes possession of the Danish West Indies after paying $25 million to Denmark, and renames the territory the U.S. Virgin Islands.

1918 - Daylight Savings Time goes into effect in the United States for the first time.

1930 - The Motion Pictures Production Code is instituted, imposing strict guidelines on the treatment of sex, crime, religion and violence in motion pictures for the next forty years.

1931 - An earthquake destroys Managua Nicaragua, killing 2,000.

 
 

1933 - The Civilian Conservation Corps is established with the mission to relieve rampant unemployment.

1942 - In World War II, Japanese forces invade Christmas Island, then a British possession.

1949 - The Dominion of Newfoundland joins Confederation and becomes the 10th Province of Canada.

1957 - Elections to the Territorial Assembly of the French colony Upper Volta. After the elections PDU and MDV form a government.

1959 - The 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, crosses the border into India and is granted political asylum.

1964 - The Dictatorship in Brazil, under the aegis of general Castello Branco, begins.

1966 - The Soviet Union launches Luna 10 which later becomes the first spaceprobe to enter orbit around the Moon.

1968 - President Lyndon Johnson announces he will not run for re-election.

1970 - Explorer 1 re-enters the Earth's atmosphere (after 12 years in orbit).

1970 - Eight terrorists from the Japanese Red Army hijacked a Japan Airlines Boeing 727 at Tokyo International Airport, wielding samurai swords and carrying a bomb.

1979 - The last British soldier leaves the Maltese Islands.

1986 - A Mexicana Boeing 727 en route to Puerto Vallarta erupts in flames and crashes in the mountains northwest of Mexico City, killing 166.

1986 - Six metropolitan county councils are abolished in England.

 
 

1994 - The journal Nature reports the finding in Ethiopia of the first complete Australopithecus afarensis skull (see Human evolution).

1996 - The community eWorld created by Apple Computer officially shut down at 12:01 am Pacific Time.

1998 - Netscape releases the code base of its browser under an open-source license agreement; the project is given the code name Mozilla and would eventually be spun off into the non-profit Mozilla Foundation.

1999 - The Matrix, first episode of the Matrix trilogy movies, is released in theaters.

2004 - Google announces Gmail, the first web-based mail service to offer 1 gigabyte of storage.

2004 - In Fallujah, Iraq, 4 American private military contractors working for Blackwater USA, are killed and their bodies mutilated after being ambushed.

 

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