Today in History

1129		The warrior Yoritomo is made Shogun without equal in Japan.
1525		Estevao Gomes returns to Portugal after failing to find a clear waterway to Asia.
1794		France surrenders the island of Corsica to the British.
1808		Napoleon Bonaparte‘s General Junot is defeated by Wellington at the first Battle of the Peninsular War at Vimeiro, Portugal.
1831		Nat Turner leads a slave revolt in Southampton County, Virginia that kills close to 60 whites.
1858		The first of a series of debates begins between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. Douglas goes on to win the Senate seat in November, but Lincoln gains national visibility for the first time.
1863		Confederate raiders under William Quantrill strike Lawrence, Kansas, leaving 150 civilians dead.
1864		Confederate General A.P. Hill attacks Union troops south of Petersburg, Va., at the Weldon railroad. His attack is repulsed, resulting in heavy Confederate casualties.
1911		The Mona Lisa, the famous painting by Leonardo da Vinci, is stolen from the Louvre in Paris, where it had hung for more than 100 years. It is recovered in 1913.
1915		Italy declares war on Turkey.
1942		U.S. Marines turn back the first major Japanese ground attack on Guadalcanal in the Battle of Tenaru.
1944		The Dumbarton Oaks conference, which lays the foundation for the establishment of the United Nations, is held in Washington, D.C.
1945		President Harry S. Truman cancels all contracts under the Lend-Lease Act.
1959		Hawaii is admitted into the Union.
1963		The South Vietnamese Army arrests over 100 Buddhist monks in Saigon.
1968		Soviet forces invade Czechoslovakia because of the country’s experiments with a more liberal government.
1972		US orbiting astronomy observatory Copernicus launched.
1976		Mary Langdon in Battle, East Sussex, becomes Britain’s first firewoman.
1976		Operation Paul Bunyan commences : after North Korean guards killed two American officers sent to trim a poplar tree along the DMZ on Aug. 18, US and ROK soldiers with heavy support chopped down the tree.
1986		In Cameroon 2,000 die from poison gas from a volcanic eruption.
1988		A ceasefire is declared in the 8-year war between Iran and Iraq.
1989		Voyager 2 begins a flyby of the planet Neptune.
1991		Communist hardliners’ coup is crushed in the USSR after just 2 days; Latvia declares independence from the USSR.
1994		Ernesto Zedillo wins Mexico’s presidential election.
1996		The new Globe theater opens in England.
2000		Tiger Woods wins golf’s PGA Championship, the first golfer to win 3 majors in a calendar year since Ben Hogan in 1953.
2001		NATO decides to send a peacekeeping force to the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia.