History refers to the Charge of the Light Brigade, which took place in 1854 when 670 British cavalrymen engaged in the Crimean War stormed a highly entrenched Russian position and were brutally murdered.
The interior secretary for US President Warren Harding, Albert B. Fall, was convicted of receiving a bribe while in office in 1929 during the Teapot Dome incident. The first member of the presidential Cabinet to be found guilty of a crime was him.
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The first Kamikaze pilot unit was used by the Japanese forces in 1944, during the Battle of Leyte Gulf off the Philippine coast.
Following China’s admission as a member of the UN in 1971, Taiwan’s Nationalist Chinese government was overthrown.
When U.S. Marines invaded the small, leftist-ruled island of Grenada in 1983 with the help of six Caribbean countries, they saved 1,000 American students and brought peace back to the island. Over 100 people were killed in roughly two months of combat.
Prime Minister Kim Campbell’s Progressive Conservative Party was defeated by Canadian voters in 1993, giving the Liberal Party—led by Quebec’s Jean Chretien—a resounding majority in Parliament.
Susan Smith made up the story that her two young boys were abducted during a carjacking in 1994. The South Carolina mom acknowledged that she killed her children when she crashed her car into a lake while they were inside, following days of intense public and media scrutiny. For the killings, she received a life sentence.
In 2002, a small plane crashed approximately 180 miles northeast of Minneapolis, killing Democratic U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota along with seven other people.
The H1N1 virus, also known as swine flu, killed 5,700 people worldwide in 2009, according to the World Health Organization, and 440,000 people were confirmed to have the disease. In 2010, a 7.7-magnitude earthquake in western Sumatra caused a tsunami that killed over 400 coastal residents and left thousands homeless, while in central Java, the Mount Merapi volcano started a series of three eruptions that left over 300 people dead and 6,000 homeless.
For the third time in three months, Rishi Sunak was formally appointed prime minister of Britain in 2022. He was the first person of color to hold that position.
Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana is chosen by House Republicans to serve as the next speaker of the House in 2023.