Last steam-hauled mainline passenger train on British Railways, 1968
On 11th August 1968 a special train set off from Liverpool Lime Street station on a return trip to Carlisle. The train, known as the ‘Fifteen Guinea Special’ because of…
The quagga became extinct, 1883
The quagga were an equine species, similar to the zebra but with stripes only on the head, neck and shoulders. They roamed the drier parts of South Africa between the…
First Jefferson Airplane gig, 1965
In the early 1960s, the singer Marty Buchwald signed to Challenge Records, which promoted him as a teen idol under the name of Marty Balin. Having failed to achieve any…
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…
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…
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…
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 utilising slave…
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…
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, 1789
On 17th June 1789 the deputies from the third-estate along with some representatives of the first two estates of the realm – the clergy and the aristocracy – withdrew from…