Today in History

1512   The laws of Burgos give New World natives legal protection against abuse and authorize Negro slavery.  
1831   HMS Beagle, with Charles Darwin on board, departs from Plymouth. It will eventually visit the Galapagos Islands where Darwin will form his theories on evolution.  
1862   Union General William Rosecrans' army begins moving slowly toward Murfreesboro, Tennessee, from Nashville.  
1913   Charles Moyer, president of the Miners Union, is shot in the back and dragged through the streets of Chicago.  
1915   In Ohio, iron and steel workers go on strike for an eight-hour day and higher wages.  
1932   Radio City Music Hall opens.
1933   Josef Stalin calls tensions with Japan a grave danger.  
1939   A series of vicious earthquakes take 11,000 lives in Turkey.  
1941   Japanese bombers attack Manila, despite its claim as an open city.  
1944   General George S. Patton's Third Army, spearheaded by the 4th Armored Division, relieves the surrounded city of Bastogne in Belgium.  
1945   The International Monetary Fund and the Bank for Reconstruction and Development are created.  
1947   The new Italian constitution is promulgated in Rome.  
1950   The United States and Spain resume relations for the first time since the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.  
1956   Segregation on buses in Tallahassee, Florida, is outlawed.
1968   The United States agrees to sell F-4 Phantom jets to Israel.  
1979   President Hafizullah Amin of Afghanistan is ousted and murdered in a coup backed by the Soviet Union, beginning a war that will last more than 10 years.  
1983   Reagan takes all responsibility for the lack of security in Beirut that allowed a terrorist on a suicide mission to kill 241 Marines.  
1984   Four Polish officers are tried for the slaying of Reverend Jerzy Popieluszko.  
1985   Palestinian guerrillas kill 18 people at airports in Rome and Vienna.  
1996   Taliban forces retake strategic Bagram Airfield during Afghan civil war.
2001   China receives permanent normal trade relations with the US.  
2004    Radiation reaches Earth from the brightest extrasolar event ever witnessed, an explosion of magnetar SGR 1806-20.  
2007   Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto assassinated.  
2007   After Mwai Kibaki is declared the winner of Kenya's presidential elections, rioting begins in Mombasa, precipitating an economic, humanitarian and political crisis.