[Here Luciana Serra camps it up as Queen of the Night, performing the so-called Queen of the Night aria (aka Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen or "Hell's vengeance boils in my heart") from Mozart's opera, The Magic Flute.]
653 CE - Having served as Archbishop of Canterbury since being consecrated by Paulinus of York at Lincoln in 627 CE, Saint Honorius died; he was succeeded by Deusdedit, who in March 655 CE became the first British-born Anglo-Saxon to hold the post.
1399 - Henry IV proclaimed himself King of England after deposing his cousin Richard II.
1744 - France's Prince of Conti alongside Spain's Infante Felipe and the Marquis de la Mina defeated the forces of King Charles Emmanuel III of the Kingdom of Sardinia at the Battle of Madonna dell'Olmo.
1791 - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's last opera, The Magic Flute, debuted at Vienna's Theater auf der Wieden; the first woman to assay the now legendary role of Queen of the Night was the composer's sister-in-law, Josepha Hofer.
1888 - Jack the Ripper claimed two more victims - Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes.
1901 - Hubert Cecil Booth patented the first electric vacuum cleaner.
1906 - Writers Manuel Curros Enríquez and Xosé Fontenla Leal founded the Real Academia Galega, the Galician language's foremost authority, with Manuel Murguía as its first president; because the Galician culture was still considered illegal in Spain at the time, the Academy was forced to open in the Cuban capital of Havana.
1938 - Britain, France, Germany, and Italy signed the Munich Agreement - which Britain's Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain famously stated would bring about 'peace for our time' but which the majority of historians today would excoriate as an inexcusable act of appeasement towards a totalitarian regime. As it turns out, ceding the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Hitler was akin to chumming shark-infested waters, and because of it within a year Europe would be embroiled in World War II...
1947 - The New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers faced off at Yankee Stadium in the first game of the first televised World Series; the Yankees would go on to win the game 5-3 and the series 4-3.
1949 - The Berlin Airlift ended.
1954 - The US Navy submarine USS Nautilus was commissioned under the command of Eugene P. Wilkinson as the world's first to be powered by a nuclear reactor; the Nautilus - actually the fourth US Navy vessel to have been given that name officially - had been launched by First Lady Mamie Eisenhower on January 21st.
1962 - César Chávez founded the United Farm Workers with Dolores Huerta.
1965 - General Suharto rose to power after an alleged coup by the Communist Party of Indonesia; in response, Suharto and his army massacred over a million Indonesians suspected of being communists.
1967 - BBC Radio 1 was launched; its first programme was presented by Tony Blackburn.
1989 - During the so-called Revolutions of 1989 West Germany's Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher made a speech from the balcony of the German embassy in Prague confirming that thousands of refugees from East Germany who'd been bivouacking in the embassy's gardens would be given passage to West Germany.
1990 - The Dalai Lama unveiled the Canadian Tribute to Human Rights in Ottawa; alas, if Stephen Harper succeeds in attaining a majority government it's slated to be turned into urinals, reflecting his government's opinion of human rights.
1991 - The democratically elected government of Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was forced from office by a military junta led by Raoul Cédras.
1994 - Aldwych tube station (originally Strand Station) of the London Underground closed after eighty-eight years of service.
2005 - Controversial drawings of the prophet Muhammed were published in Denmark by the newspaper Jyllands-Posten; as much as I believe in my own right to republish them here, I'm too young to die. The link to Wikipedia will have to do.
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