Today in History

1035		King Canute of Norway dies.
1276		Suspicious of the intentions of Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, the Prince of Wales, English King Edward I resolves to invade Wales.
1859		The first flying-trapeze circus act is performed by Jules Leotard at the Circus Napoleon.
1863		Confederate General James Longstreet arrives at Loudon, Tennessee, to assist the attack on Union General Ambrose Burnside’s troops at Knoxville.
1867		Mount Vesuvius erupts.
1903		The Lebaudy brothers of France set an air-travel distance record of 34 miles in a dirigible.
1923		Adolf Hitler is arrested for his attempted German coup.
1927		Canada is admitted to the League of Nations.
1928		The ocean liner Vestris sinks off the Virginia cape with 328 aboard, killing 111.
1938		Mexico agrees to compensate the United States for land seizures.
1941		Madame Lillian Evanti and Mary Cardwell Dawson establish the National Negro Opera Company.
1944		U.S. fighters wipe out a Japanese convoy near Leyte, consisting of six destroyers, four transports and 8,000 troops.
1944		The German battleship Tirpitz is sunk in a Norwegian fjord.
1948		Hikedi Tojo, Japanese prime minister, and seven others are sentenced to hang by an international tribunal.
1951		The U.S. Eighth Army in Korea is ordered to cease offensive operations and begin an active defense.
1960		The satellite Discoverer XVII is launched into orbit from California’s Vandenberg AFB.
1968		The U.S. Supreme Court voids an Arkansas law banning the teaching of evolution in public schools.
1971		President Richard Nixon announces the withdrawal of about 45,000 U.S. troops from Vietnam by February.
1987		Boris Yeltsin is fired as head of Moscow’s Communist Party for criticizing the slow pace of reform.
1990		Crown Prince Akihito is formally installed as Emperor Akihito of Japan.
1990		Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist, publishes a formal proposal for the creation of the World Wide Web.
1996		A Saudi Arabian Airlines Boeing 747 collides with a Kazakh Illyushin II-76 cargo plane near New Delhi, killing 349. It is the deadliest mid-air collision to date (2013) and third-deadliest aircraft accident.
1997		Ramzi Yousef convicted of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
2003		The first Italians to die in the Iraq War are among 23 fatalities from a suicide bomb attack on an Italian police base in Nasiriya, iraq.
2003		Shanghai Transrapid sets a new world speed record (311 mph or 501 kph) for commercial railway systems.