Cologne Cathedral completed, 1880
In 1164, Cologne’s Archbishop Rainald von Dassel brought the relics of the Magi to the city after the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, took them from Milan. These relics attracted…
Peterloo Massacre, 1819
In spite of victory, the Napoleonic Wars left Britain with chronic economic problems. The Government’s response, the Corn Laws, resulted in famine and unemployment, which only served to politicise the…
Indonesian independence declared, 1945
In the early sixteenth century, Portuguese explorers arrived in Indonesia seeking a source of spices that would break the monopoly of Muslim traders and their Venetian agents. Over the next…
Battle of Lower Sioux Agency, 1862
In 1851, the United States government signed a pair of treaties with the Dakota Sioux who ceded much of their land in the Minnesota Territory in return for goods and…
Buffalo Nine arrested, 1968
In the summer of 1968, a group of anti-war protesters centred on the University of Buffalo in New York State began to engage in draft resistance. Fearing arrest, a number…
Tucson, Arizona founded, 1775
Hugh O’Connor was born in Dublin in 1732 into an aristocratic family. Like many contemporary Irish Catholics of the day, Hugh saw no future for himself in his homeland, which…
Warsaw Pact troops invaded Czechoslovakia, 1968
In January 1968, Alexander Dubček became First Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Dubček was previously leader of the party in Slovakia, where he had implemented a programme of…
Haitian Revolution, 1791
At the time of the Storming of the Bastille in Paris, the French territories on the island of Hispaniola, known as Saint-Domingue, produced forty per cent of the world’s sugar…
British capture of Hong Kong, 1839
During the eighteenth century, the demand in Britain for Chinese luxury goods, such as porcelain, silk and tea, created an enormous trade deficit because the British lacked any profitable product…
First man swam across the English Channel, 1875
Matthew Webb was born at Dawlish, Shropshire, on 18th January 1848 to a country doctor of the same name and his wife, Sarah. By the age of eight, Webb had…