Today in History…This Stuff Happened
1494 – The infamous, scheming and art loving Medici family is expelled from Florence.
1620 – After long months at sea on the Mayflower, English separatist “pilgrims” first spot land at Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
1799 – In France, Napoleon leads a coup d’état leading to the end of the Directory and the creation of the Consulate.
1857 – The Atlantic Magazine is founded in Boston.
1867 – Tokugawa Shogunate cedes power to Japan’s Emperor, the Meiji Restoration “enlightened rule” begins.
1906 – Theodore Roosevelt leaves the US to visit the Panama Canal. He is the first acting President of the United States to make an official trip outside the country. Woodrow Wilson follows up a little more than a decade later with his trip to Europe for the Treaty of Versailles.
1918 – Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicates following the German Revolution, Germany is proclaimed a Republic, a period later known as the “Weimar Republic”.
1921 – Albert Einstein wins the Nobel Prize in Physics.
1967 – Rolling Stone Magazine is first published.
1989 – The Fall of the Berlin Wall begins when East Germany opens checkpoints in the Berlin Wall and allows East Germans to travel to West Germany.
1998 – Capital punishment in the United Kingdom is completely abolished.
2004— Roger Clemens wins a record seventh Cy Young award.
