[The Murder of David Rizzio, painted by William Allen in 1833, had previously been painted by John Opie in 1787.]
1202 - Norway's King
Sverre died; he was succeeded by his illegitimate son
Håkon, as chronicled in the
Sverris saga and the
Bagler sagas.
1230 - Bulgarian Tsar
Ivan Asen II defeated
Theodore of Epirus at the
Battle of Klokotnitsa.
1566 - David Rizzio - the private secretary to Mary, Queen of Scots - was murdered in her presence in Edinburgh's Palace of Holyroodhouse; stabbed more than fifty times before being thrown down a flight of stairs, his body was then taken and hastily buried. The Queen's jealous husband Lord Darnley was said to be responsible, although the plot may have been funded by her rival Elizabeth I of England in an effort to weaken Mary both politically and emotionally; Darnley's equally ghastly murder in February 1567 is thought to have been in retribution.
1765 - After a public campaign by the writer
Voltaire, judges in Paris posthumously exonerated Protestant merchant
Jean Calas of murdering his own son
Marc-Antoine three years to the day after Calas had been sentenced to die. The elder Calas had been tortured and executed in March 1762 on the charge, even though the younger Calas had actually committed suicide; the harsh and ultimately spurious judgement against him had been motivated by religious bigotry in what was still a very Catholic country.
1776 -
Adam Smith's landmark book on economics,
The Wealth of Nations, was published.
1796 -
Napoléon Bonaparte married his first wife,
Joséphine de Beauharnais.
1841 - The US Supreme Court delivered its decision in the
Amistad case, concerning captive Africans who had seized control of the slave-trading ship carrying them in July 1839: the court ruled that they had been taken into slavery illegally, events recounted cinematically in
Steven Spielberg's
1997 film Amistad.
1842 -
Giuseppe Verdi's third opera
Nabucco premiered at the
Teatro alla Scala in Milan; concerning the anti-Semitism of
Nebuchadnezzar, its success established Verdi as one of Italy's foremost opera writers.
1862 - During the American Civil War the
USS Monitor and
CSS Virginia fought to a draw at the
Battle of Hampton Roads, the first fight between two
ironclad warships.
1908 - The Italian football club
Inter Milan was founded.
1910 - The
Westmoreland County Coal Strike, involving 15,000 coal miners represented by the
United Mine Workers trade union, began in Pennsylvania; the strike would last until July 1911.
1916 - Outraged at the US government's support for the regime of President
Venustiano Carranza, revolutionary
Pancho Villa led 1,500 Mexican raiders in an attack against
Columbus, New Mexico, killing 17.
1933 - Congress began its first 100 days of enacting
New Deal legislation - with the aim of alleviating an ever-worsening
Great Depression - when President
Franklin D. Roosevelt submitted the
Emergency Banking Act.
1954 - CBS television broadcast an episode of its news program
See It Now, entitled
A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy; produced by
Fred W. Friendly and legendary newsman
Edward R. Murrow, the program's attack on
McCarthyism has since been called 'Television's Finest Hour'.
1957 - The magnitude 8.6
Andreanof Islands Earthquake and its resultant tsunami (which caused damage as far away as Hawai'i) struck Alaska's
Aleutian Islands.
1977 - During the
Hanafi Muslim Siege approximately a dozen armed Hanafi Muslims seized 3 buildings in Washington, DC (city hall, B'nai B'rith headquarters, and the Islamic Center) killing reporter Maurice Williams and security guard Mack Cantrell and taking 149 hostages; the situation ended 2 days later with only the two fatalities, due in part to the intervention of three Muslim ambassadors - Egypt's Ashraf Ghorbal, Pakistan's Sahabzada Yaqub-Khan and Iran's
Ardeshir Zahedi.
1990 - Dr.
Antonia Novello was sworn in as
Surgeon General of the United States, becoming both the first female and Hispanic American to serve in that position.
1997 - Rapper
The Notorious B.I.G. - aka Christopher Wallace - was murdered, following an after-party for that year's
Soul Train Music Awards at the
Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles; a
2009 biopic entitled
Notorious starring
Jamal 'Gravy' Woolard dramatized his life and death.
2006 - Liquid water was discovered on
Enceladus, the sixth largest moon of
Saturn.
*
On this day in 1948 one of the most important figures in modern pop culture - my mum! - was born. Now, I can already hear you asking: what role exactly does your mother (whom I've never even heard of until just now) play in pop culture? Well, she gave birth to me, your Blogmaster of Ceremonies, for one...
