POPnews - June 24th

[For years this lovely bit of water-coloured animation was the sign-off at the end of the programming day on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada's national broadcaster. This version was always a favourite of mine, as I find it very stirring, so I thought I'd share it with you on the song's 129th anniversary.]

972 CE - The Battle of Cedynia, the first documented victory of Polish forces, took place when that country's Duke Mieszko I defeated Odo I, Margrave of Saxon Ostmark.

1128 - At the Battle of São Mamede, near Guimarães, Portuguese forces led by Alfonso I defeated an army loyal to his mother Dona Teresa and her lover Fernando Perez de Trava; following the battle, Alfonso took to calling himself 'Prince of Portugal', and the battle is now seen as the first step towards an independent Portugal, which sovereignty was affirmed after the Battle of Ourique in 1139.

1374 - A sudden outbreak of St. John's Dance caused people in the German town of Aachen to experience hallucinations and begin to jump and twitch uncontrollably until they collapsed from exhaustion.

1497 - John Cabot became the first European in Newfoundland in nearly five hundred years when he landed, possibly at Cape Bonavista.

1535 - The Anabaptist state of Münster was conquered and disbanded following the Münster Rebellion; an attempt by Bernhard Knipperdolling to establish a theocracy there was met with harsh reprisals, as many of the radicals were later tortured and executed in the town square.

1571 - Manila, now the capital of the Republic of the Philippines, was founded by Miguel Lopez de Legazpi.

1692 - The city of Kingston, Jamaica, was founded.

1880 - Ironically enough, O Canada was first performed publicly in Quebec City as part of that city's St. Jean-Baptiste Day festivities.

1901 - The works of a talented but unknown 20 year-old named Pablo Picasso were given their first public exhibition at a cafe called Els Quatre Gats in his hometown of Barcelona.

1916 - Canadian Mary Pickford became filmdom's first million dollar lady by forming the Pickford Film Corporation within Famous Players.

1918 - Legend has it Canada's airmail service was instituted, between Montreal and Toronto.

1938 - A 450 tonne (496 ton) meteorite struck the earth in an empty field near Chicora, Pennsylvania.

1945 - The Moscow Victory Parade took place in that city's Red Square following the defeat of Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War; it was the first event in Soviet history to be filmed in colour.

1947 - Kenneth Arnold made the first widely reported UFO sighting, near Mount Rainier, Washington.

1949 - The first television Western aired on NBC; Hopalong Cassidy starred William Boyd, who was uniquely qualified for the role - he'd played the character 66 times since 1935 in an enormously popular series of films.

1957 - The US Supreme Court ruled that obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment in Roth v. United States.

1983 - Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, returned to Earth safely as part of NASA's STS-7 Space Shuttle mission.

1985 - The Space Shuttle Discovery completed its mission - STS-51-G - which is today best remembered for having Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the first Arab and first Muslim in space, as a Payload Specialist.

2002 - The Igandu train disaster in Tanzania killed 281, making it the worst train accident in African history.
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