1521 Pope Leo X excommunicates rebel priest Martin Luther, who begins the reformation of the church.
1777 American General George Washington beats the British at the Battle of Princeton.
1833 The UK claims sovereignty over the Falkland Islands.
1892 JRR Tolkien, the author of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, is born in Bloemfontein.
1924 British egyptologist Howard Carter finds the sarcophagus of Tutankhamen in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor after several years of searching.
1925 Benito Mussolini announces he is taking dictatorial powers over Italy.
1946 William Joyce, an Englishman known as ‘Lord Haw Haw’, is hanged for treason in London. Joyce broadcast Nazi propaganda from Germany to Britain during World War II.
1957 The Hamilton Watch Company introduces the first electric watch.
1959 Alaska becomes the 49th US state, with a land mass almost one-fifth of the size of the lower 48 states combined.
1961 A protest by agricultural workers in Baixa de Cassanje, Portuguese Angola, turns into a revolt, starting the Angolan War of Independence – the first of the Portuguese colonial wars.
1980 The author of the book Born Free, Joy Adamson, is murdered in Kenya.
1987 Rev Allan Hendrikse and 150 supporters swim in defiance of the apartheid laws at a Whites-Only beach in Port Elizabeth.
1990 US invasion of Panama: after a manhunt, Manuel Noriega, its former leader, surrenders.
1994 More than 7 million people from the former apartheid homelands receive South African citizenship.
2018 For the first time in history all five major storm surge gates in the Netherlands are closed simultaneously in the wake of a storm.
2019 China’s Chang’e 4 makes the first landing on the far side of the Moon.
2020 Iranian General Qasem Soleimani is killed by a drone’s missile in a US airstrike near Baghdad International Airport..
2022 Apple becomes the first company worth $3 trillion in value, after tripling its price in under four years. It was started 45 years to the day, in 1976. | The Historian