| 452 | Attila the Hun invades Italy. | |
| 632 | Muhammad, the founder of Islam and unifier of Arabia, dies. | |
| 793 | The Vikings raid the Northumbrian coast of England. | |
| 1861 | Tennessee votes to secede from the Union and join the Confederacy. | |
| 1862 | The Army of the Potomac defeats Confederate forces at Battle of Cross Keys, Virginia. | |
| 1863 | Residents of Vicksburg flee into caves as General Ulysses S. Grant‘s army begins shelling the town. | |
| 1866 | Prussia annexes the region of Holstein. | |
| 1904 | U.S. Marines land in Tangiers, Morocco, to protect U.S. citizens. | |
| 1908 | King Edward VII of England visits Czar Nicholas II of Russia in an effort to improve relations between the two countries. | |
| 1915 | William Jennings Bryan quits as Secretary of State under President Woodrow Wilson. | |
| 1953 | The Supreme Court forbids segregated lunch counters in Washington, D.C. | |
| 1965 | President Lyndon Johnson authorizes commanders in Vietnam to commit U.S. ground forces to combat. | |
| 1966 | Gemini astronaut Gene Cernan attempts to become the first man to orbit the Earth untethered to a space capsule, but is unable to when he exhausts himself fitting into his rocket pack. | |
| 1967 | Israeli airplanes attack the USS Liberty, a surveillance ship, in the Mediterranean, killing 34 Navy crewmen. | |
| 1968 | James Earl Ray, the alleged assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr., is captured at the London Airport. | |
| 1969 | Nixon meets with President Thieu of South Vietnam to tell him 25,000 U.S. troops will pull out by August. | |
| 1995 | U.S. Air Force pilot Captain Scott O’Grady is rescued by U.S. Marines in Bosnia. |
The colonial government waged a war on rats that began with professional rat hunters, but soon expanded to offering a bounty to the public: a penny for each rat killed. You might be able to see where this is going, and you'd be right. No matter how many bounties were paid, the rats only multiplied. Read the story of the Great Hanoi Rat Massacre at Atlas Obscura.It turns out that when Doumer’s colonial government laid more than nine miles of sewage pipe beneath Hanoi, it inadvertently created nine miles of cool, dark rodent paradise, where the pests could breed without fear of predators. And when they got hungry, the rats had direct access to the city’s ritziest real estate via a subterranean superhighway. Under the streets of French Hanoi, rats multiplied exponentially—and then skittered to the surface.
As if it wasn’t enough that these furry invaders disrupted the colonists’ illusion of European tranquility in Asia, cases of the bubonic plague started popping up, and rats were suspected of carrying the disease. Something had to be done.
