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841 Battle of Fontenay.

1218 Death of Simon de Montfort, 5^th Earl of Leicester (b. 1160), Norman crusader.

1579 Death of Hatano Hideharu (b. 1541), Japanese daimyo and samurai.

1591 Scotland: Euphemia Macalzean was burned at the stake on charges of witchcraft.

1634 Death of John Marston, playwright.

1767 Death of Georg Philipp Telemann, composer.

1788 Virginia ratified the United States Constitution and was admitted as the 10^th state of the United States.

1795 Luxembourg capitulated to the French.

1797 Admiral Horatio Nelson lost his arm in battle.

1842 The Illustrated London News reported on An Gorta Mór, the Irish Potato Famine.

The Irish Potato Famine, also called The Great Famine or The Great Hunger (Irish: An Gorta Mór), is the name given to a famine which struck Ireland between 1846 and 1849. The Famine was at least fifty years in the making, due the disastrous balance between British economic policy, destructive farming methods, and the unfortunate appearance of 'the Blight' – the potato fungus that almost instantly destroyed the major food source for the majority population. The immediate after-effects of The Famine continued until 1851, and in the five years from 1846 some 750,000 deaths are attributed to starvation (estimates vary), and much the same number of people emigrated to Britain, the United States, Canada and Australia (see the Irish Diaspora).

More reports on An Gorta Mor, from The Times of London

Thomas Meagher and the Young Irelanders, in the Scriptorium
(Meagher was an Irish rebel, Australian convict, and US Civil War general)

April 3, 1847 in the Book of Days: Choctaw Native Americans helped the starving Irish by donation

1852 Australia: Seventy-seven (some sources put the number up to 83 or even higher) out of 250 residents of the village of Gundagai, New South Wales, drowned when the Murrumbidgee River flooded. Gundagai at the time was a crossing point for people en route to the Victorian gold fields.

Many were saved by local indigenous people, notably Yarri who rescued 49 stranded people in his bark canoe, braving the torrents of one of the continent's largest rivers to pluck the survivors one at a time from treetops and roofs, working perhaps 50 hours without a break.

Following the rescue, Yarri was given a copper shield to wear around his neck (breastplates were a decoration not infrequently bestowed by Europeans to Aboriginals considered worthy of respect), but for nearly 140 years neither Yarri nor Jacky, his partner in the rescue, really gained the recognition they deserved.

On September 27, 1990, State Premier, Nick Greiner, unveiled a headstone on Yarri's grave (in the Gundagai Catholic Cemetery), erected by the Tumut-Brungle Local Aboriginal Land Council. While Yarri's memory had been commemorated in a number of smaller monuments around the township, his grave had been previously unmarked.

"Considering the situation for Aborigines at the time did not evoke generosity towards white settlers, Yarri's efforts were truly remarkable," Premier Greiner said. "This simple ceremony today honours someone whose extraordinary love for fellow humans is an inspiring example to all."

Related: Jack Moses/Dog on Tuckerbox, "nine miles from Gundagai", in the Book of Days

1857 French novelist Gustave Flaubert went on trial for offences against public morality, due to his controversial book Madame Bovary, the tale of a sexually promiscuous woman.

1857 Charles Baudelaire's volume of poems Les Fleurs du Mal was published. He and his publishers were swiftly prosecuted for offending public morals.   Source

1857 Henry Walter became the first Australian to be killed by a train. (Knocked off a train while celebrating the completion of the Geelong-Melbourne line.)

1864 Through Prince Otto von Bismarck's astuteness the London Conference on Denmark ended with nothing achieved.

1866 Japan concluded a tariff convention with Britain, France, Holland and US.  

1867 Barbed wire was patented by Lucien B Smith, of Kent, Ohio, USA.

Barbed Wire Museum

1870 Isabella II of Spain abdicated in favour of Alfonso XII.

1872 The Jesuits were expelled from Germany.

1876 Custer's Last Stand: Lt.-Col. George Custer, an American army officer with a good reputation, was killed with his 200 men at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, by 2,000 native American warriors led by Chief Tatanka Iyotake (Sitting Bull). Only the body of Custer was spared mutilation by the victors.

1878 USA: Ezra Heywood, anarchist, was sentenced to two years' hard labour for advocating sexual emancipation.

Early progressives in the Book of Days    CounterCulture Wiki

1880 Cape Parliament rejected a scheme for a South African federation.

1885 On the resignation of William Ewart Gladstone, Lord Salisbury became the British Conservative PM.

1886 Arturo Toscanini conducted for the first time.

1887 US, Britain and Germany conferred in Washington on Samoa.

1895 Lord Salisbury formed a Unionist ministry, Britain.

1903 Polish scientist Marie Curie announced the discovery of radium.  

1906 In one of America's most sensational cases of the 20^th century, Stanford White (b. 1853) was shot and killed by Harry K Thaw, the jealous millionaire husband of Evelyn Nesbit ('The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing'; 1884 - 1967), a popular actress and artist's model, whom White had seduced when she was 16.

1910 The Mann Act was passed in the USA – now it became illegal to bring a woman across State lines for "immoral purposes".

1912 George Lansbury protested in the British House of Commons against forcible feeding of suffragettes.

A world chronology of women's suffrage    US chronology    Louisa Lawson, Australian suffragette

1920 The Hague was selected as the seat of the International Court of Justice.

1921 The word 'robot' entered the world's languages in Karel Capek's play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots).

1924 Britain stated she would not abandon The Sudan, despite Egyptian demands for complete evacuation.

1925 Theodore Pangalos became premier of Greece in an Athens coup d'état.

1925 The first car telephone was demonstrated in Germany.

1938 Dr Douglas Hyde was elected the first President of Ireland.

1945 Seán T O'Kelly was elected the second President of Ireland on the retirement of Douglas Hyde.

1950 The beginning of the Korean War – North Korean forces invaded South Korea.

1953 John Christie was sentenced to death for the murder of four women, whose bodies he had kept at his home in west London. His neighbour and tenant Timothy Evans had been found guilty of a murder for which it is generally considered Christie was responsible, and was hanged on March 9, 1950.

1959 Eamon de Valera was elected the third President of Ireland.

1961 Abdul Karim Qassim declared Kuwait an integral part of Iraq.

1962 The USA Supreme Court ruled prayer in public schools is unconstitutional.

1962 Italian film actress Sophia Loren was indicted in Rome for bigamy. Italian law did not recognise the previous divorce of her husband Carlo Ponti.

1967 Our World was broadcast globally, the first live international satellite television production and a significant event in the world's unfolding sense of globality.

Performers in twenty-six nations were invited to perform in separate segments featuring their country, and the six-hour event had the largest television audience ever up to that point: 400 million people around the globe were watching live, your almanackist included.

Today, it is most famous for the British segment which starred The Beatles. They wanted to spread a message of peace to the world, so they broadcast a live set singing 'All You Need Is Love' which had been written especially for the occasion. The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Marianne Faithfull, Keith Moon and Graham Nash, among others, showed up and sang along. The performance was done after one take in rehearsal.