1845 – The first issue of Scientific American magazine is published.

1850 – Richard Wagner's Lohengrin premieres at the Staatskapelle Weimar.

1859 – The Carrington event is the strongest geomagnetic storm on record to strike the Earth. Electrical telegraph service is widely disrupted.

1898 – Caleb Bradham's beverage "Brad's Drink" is renamed "Pepsi-Cola".

1936 – Nazi Germany begins its mass arrests of Jehovah's Witnesses, who are interned in concentration camps.

1955 – Black teenager Emmett Till is lynched in Mississippi for whistling at a white woman, galvanizing the nascent civil rights movement.

1957 – U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond begins a filibuster to prevent the United States Senate from voting on the Civil Rights Act of 1957; he stopped speaking 24 hours and 18 minutes later. This would remain the longest speech ever conducted by a single Senator until Cory Booker spoke for 25 hours and five minutes, beginning on March 31, 2025.

1963 – March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom: Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gives his I Have a Dream speech.

1656 – The Netherlands and the Ahanta people signed the Treaty of Butre, creating a Dutch protectorate over the country of Upper Ahanta in modern-day Ghana.

1896 – In the shortest recorded war in history, the Sultanate of Zanzibar surrendered to the United Kingdom after less than an hour of conflict.

2013 – Religious violence between Hindus and Muslims erupted in Muzaffarnagar district, Uttar Pradesh, India, leaving 62 people dead.

1859 – Petroleum is discovered in Titusville, Pennsylvania, leading to the world's first commercially successful oil well.

1883 – Eruption of Krakatoa: Four enormous explosions almost completely destroy the island of Krakatoa and cause years of climate change.

1939 – First flight of the turbojet-powered Heinkel He 178, the world's first jet aircraft.

1955 – The first edition of the Guinness Book of Records is published in Great Britain.

1956 – The nuclear power station at Calder Hall in the United Kingdom was connected to the national power grid becoming the world's first commercial nuclear power station to generate electricity on an industrial scale.

1609 – Galileo Galilei demonstrates his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers.

1916 – The United States National Park Service is created.

1991 – Linus Torvalds announces the first version of what will become Linux.

2012 – Voyager 1 spacecraft enters interstellar space, becoming the first man-made object to do so.

1857 – The Panic of 1857 begins, setting off one of the most severe economic crises in United States history.

1941 – The Holocaust: Adolf Hitler orders the cessation of Nazi Germany's systematic T4 euthanasia program of the mentally ill and the handicapped due to protests, although killings continue for the remainder of the war.

1954 – The Communist Control Act goes into effect, outlawing the Communist Party in the United States.

1967 – Led by Abbie Hoffman, the Youth International Party temporarily disrupts trading at the New York Stock Exchange by throwing dollar bills from the viewing gallery, causing trading to cease as brokers scramble to grab them.

1991 – Ukraine declares itself independent from the Soviet Union.

1995 – Microsoft releases Windows 95 to the public in North America.

1998 – First radio-frequency identification (RFID) human implantation tested in the United Kingdom.

2006 – The International Astronomical Union (IAU) redefines the term "planet" such that Pluto is now considered a dwarf planet.

2016 – Proxima Centauri b, the closest exoplanet to Earth, is discovered by the European Southern Observatory.

2023 – Japan officially begins discharging treated radioactive water from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant into the Pacific Ocean, sparking international concerns and condemnation.

 Lazy8 wrote:
 
Sure, and Al Capone only served time for tax evasion. Weaver was a white nationalist with ties to the Aryan Nations, the Feds certainly did entrap him (completely improper), but it's not like he was just a guy hanging around. I'm not super versed in this, but I think his wife was also pretty into the Aryan Nations stuff. All this is tied up in the Turner Diaries/Neo-Nazi/wannabe revolutionary movement that was especially active in the region at the time. Strictly illegal - No, but not without merit for some extra oversight.  

Are our Federal government goons a bit mad about keeping their own power? Sure. Do they have too much leeway? yep. Did they overreach on that already stretched leeway here? Absolutely. Does that make Weaver any less of a jerk?  Not to me. He certainly didn't deserve anything that happened to him, but he's hardly an innocent bystander (like his kids were, due to his actions). Weaver himself eventually expressed regret over his actions and said - "I'm not totally without fault in this." (Warning: NYTimes link https://timesmachine.nytimes.c...).

So a slight modification to my previous statement. Every Adult involved with this deserves condemnation. No one deserved to get shot over any of this. 

 islander wrote:
Funny, the feds included them. One of them was the first person shot.

The bad choice that triggered all this? Cutting 2 shotgun barrels (allegedly) 1/4" shorter than the legal minimum without paying for tax stamps. The only crime Weaver actually served time for was for missing a court date—and you can see the chain of events that led to that here. I'll agree that those are bad choices and stupid reasons to kill people and put the survivors in prison, but I doubt that's what you meant.

I don't have to defend Randy Weaver's beliefs to defend his right to live without feds framing him for a crime and killing his wife and child to prosecute it. Even people you don't like deserve to be left alone. He never hurt anyone and was never a threat to anyone; the violence that devatated his family was instigated by the federal government.

You're free to condemn him as a bad person for what he believed; I condemn the government that tried to kill him for what it did.

1775 – American Revolutionary War: King George III delivers his Proclamation of Rebellion to the Court of St James's stating that the American colonies have proceeded to a state of open and avowed rebellion.

1831 – Nat Turner's rebellion of enslaved Virginians is suppressed.

1927 – Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti are executed after a lengthy, controversial trial.

1966 – Lunar Orbiter 1 takes the first photograph of Earth from orbit around the Moon.

1970 – Organized by Mexican American labor union leader César Chávez, the Salad Bowl strike, the largest farm worker strike in U.S. history, begins.

1975 – The start of the Wave Hill walk-off by Gurindji people in Australia, lasting eight years, a landmark event in the history of Indigenous land rights in Australia, commemorated in a 1991 Paul Kelly song and an annual celebration.

1989 – Singing Revolution: Two million people from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania stand on the Vilnius–Tallinn road, holding hands.

1991 – The World Wide Web is opened to the public.

 Lazy8 wrote:

I wouldn't include the kids in the bad people count. But all of the adults made some pretty bad choices for some pretty stupid reasons. 

 islander wrote:
Well, you're half right.

Four of those people were children—one was an infant—and three of them survived. One of Randy Weaver's daughters wrote about their experiences and their lives after. Those stories don't fit your image.

 Red_Dragon wrote:

No good people in this incident. And there is a throughline from here to today's mess. 

1989 – Nolan Ryan strikes out Rickey Henderson to become the first Major League Baseball pitcher to record 5,000 strikeouts.

1992 – FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi shoots and kills Vicki Weaver during an 11-day siege at her home at Ruby Ridge, Idaho.

2007 – The Texas Rangers defeat the Baltimore Orioles 30–3, the most runs scored by a team in modern Major League Baseball history.

1957 – The Soviet Union successfully conducts a long-range test flight of the R-7 Semyorka, the first intercontinental ballistic missile.

1858 – Charles Darwin first publishes his theory of evolution through natural selection in The Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, alongside Alfred Russel Wallace's same theory.

1920 – The first commercial radio station, 8MK (now WWJ), begins operations in Detroit.

1938 – Lou Gehrig hits his 23rd career grand slam, a record that stood for 75 years until it was broken by Alex Rodriguez.

1940 – In Mexico City, exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky is fatally wounded with an ice axe by Ramón Mercader. He dies the next day.

1975 – Viking program: NASA launches the Viking 1 planetary probe toward Mars.

1977 – Voyager program: NASA launches the Voyager 2 spacecraft.

1998 – The Supreme Court of Canada rules that Quebec cannot legally secede from Canada without the federal government's approval.

1692 – Salem witch trials: In Salem, province of Massachusetts Bay, Martha Carrier, George Jacobs Sr., John Proctor, John Willard, and clergyman George Burroughs are executed after being convicted of witchcraft.

1839 – The French government announces that Louis Daguerre's photographic process is a gift "free to the world".

1927 – Patriarch Sergius of Moscow proclaims the declaration of loyalty of the Russian Orthodox Church to the Soviet Union.

1934 – The German referendum of 1934 approves Adolf Hitler's appointment as head of state with the title of Führer.

1953 – Cold War: The CIA and MI6 help to overthrow the government of Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran and reinstate the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

2004 – Google Inc. has its initial public offering on Nasdaq.

2005 – The first-ever joint military exercise between Russia and China, called Peace Mission 2005 begins.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre was released on this day in 1973

1920 – The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution is ratified, guaranteeing women's suffrage.

1958 – Vladimir Nabokov's controversial novel Lolita is published in the United States.

1977 – Steve Biko is arrested at a police roadblock under Terrorism Act No. 83 of 1967 in King William's Town, South Africa. He later dies from injuries sustained during this arrest, bringing attention to South Africa's apartheid policies.

1876 – Richard Wagner's Götterdämmerung, the last opera in his Ring cycle, premieres at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus.

1945 – The novella Animal Farm by George Orwell is first published.

1970 – Soviet Union Venera program: Venera 7 launched. It will become the first spacecraft to successfully transmit data from the surface of another planet (Venus).

1998 – Lewinsky scandal: US President Bill Clinton admits in taped testimony that he had an "improper physical relationship" with White House intern Monica Lewinsky; later that same day he admits before the nation that he "misled people" about the relationship.

1876 – Richard Wagner's Siegfried, the penultimate opera in his Ring cycle, is premiered at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus.

1920 – Ray Chapman of the Cleveland Indians is hit on the head by a fastball thrown by Carl Mays of the New York Yankees. Next day, Chapman will become the second player to die from injuries sustained in a Major League Baseball game.