More than just dates and boring facts.
1497 Bonfire of the vanities: religious fanatics burn thousands of objects (cosmetics, art, and books) in Florence on Shrove Tuesday festival.
1783 The seige of Gibraltar is begun by American allies France and Spain against the British colony during American War of Independence.
1848 Flooding along the Cape frontier, near Peddie, causes extensive damage.
1881 At the Battle at Ingogo, in the Transvaal, the Boers beat superior British forces.
1886 While laying foundations for a house, George Walker discovers gold in Gauteng.
1900 British troops fail in their third attempt to lift the Siege of Ladysmith.
1901 Bubonic plague comes to Cape Town.
1943 The Japanese Navy evacuates troops from Guadalcanal, ending attempts to retake the island from Allied forces.
1945 General Douglas MacArthur makes good on his promise and returns to the Phillipines.
1959 A Cessna light plane lands in Las Vegas after 65 continuous days in the air. It was a publicity stunt for a Las Vegas hotel. Two pilots lived in the plane, working four-hour shifts and winching supplies up, including fuel and Christmas lunch, from a speeding truck.
1962 A gas explosion in a German coal mine kills 298 miners.
1969 Nigerian planes bomb and strafe a village in Biafra, killing more than 200 people.
1984 David ‘Bubble Boy’ Vetter, 12, touches his mother for the first time. Born in the US with a disease that dramatically weakens the immune system, he dies later in the year, having spent his life in a sterile ‘bubble’.
1997 NeXT merges with Apple Computer, which leads to Mac OS X operating system.
2005 Britain’s Ellen MacArthur becomes the fastest person to sail solo around the world, taking 71 days and 14 hours.
2013 Mississippi officially certifies the Thirteenth Amendment, becoming the last US state to approve the abolition of slavery.
2018 A study finds all citrus fruit can be traced to the foothills of the Himalayas.
2021 A Himalayan glacier crashes into a river, destroying a dam and causing a huge flood in India’s Uttarakhand province, killing 26 and leaving 150 missing.
