Some of the more interesting things that happened on this day.
1272 While on the Ninth Crusade, Prince Edward becomes King of England, but does not return to England for nearly two years to assume the throne.
1532 Spaniard Francisco Pizarro captures Inca Emperor Atahualpa after an ambush at Cajamarca.
1818 Carl August Pacalt, missionary of the London Missionary Society, dies at his mission station, Hoogekraal, George. The settlement is renamed Pacaltsdorp.
1855 Explorer David Livingstone reaches the Victoria Falls and names it after his queen.
1855 Pretoria is chosen as the capital of the ZAR, but the seat of the government remains in Potchefstroom until 1860.
1894 The Turks massacre 6 000 Armenians in Kurdistan, but it’s not the last genocide the Turks carry out: between 600 000 and 1.2 million Armenian Christians living are killed from 1915-16; and the Assaryrian and Greek genocides of 1915, and 1914-22 respectively two others. In all, there are nine mass slaughters, mostly based on ethnicity and religion as the dwindling Ottoman empire struggle to reassert itself.
1900 The Boer War Battle of Sprinkaansnek is fought.
1938 LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide) is first synthesised by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel.
1940 The Nazis seal the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto from the outside world.
1948 Operation Magic Carpet begins as the first Jews are flown from Yemen to Israel.
1988 Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto’s PPP party wins the first free Pakistani elections in 11 years.
1989 President FW de Klerk announces the abandonment of the Separate Amenities Act, opening the country’s beaches to all races.
1990 Pop group Milli Vanilli is stripped of their Grammy Award because the duo did not sing on the ‘Girl You Know It’s True’ album.
2003 Football great Lionel Messi makes his debut for FC Barcelona in a friendly against Porto.
2015 The largest diamond discovered in more than a century, a 1 111 carat stone, is found in the Karowe mine, in Botswana.
2018 A lift falls 84 floors when the hoist rope breaks, all six people survive unharmed at the John Hancock Center in Chicago.
2019 The 500th anniversary of the founding of Havana, Cuba.
2019 Britain’s Prince Andrew denies in a BBC interview that he had sex with a 17-year-old girl connected to sex offender and friend Jeffery Epstein.
2020 Peru's Congress votes in its third president in a week, Francisco Sagasti after violent protests.