Important Dates in History-3
Date Event
December 17, 1903 Wilbur Wright (1867-1912) & Orville Wright (1871-1948) made the first heavier-than-air flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, as their biplane Wright Flyer remained in the air for 12 seconds covering 120 feet.
June 23, 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1863-1914) assassinated in Sarajevo by Bosnian Serbs initiating World War I.
November 7, 1917 Kerenky's Constitutional Democrats that was set up after the abdication of Czar Nicholas on March 2, 1917, was toppled in a bloody coup on November 7, 1917 by the Bolsheviks under Nikolai Lenin (1870-1924). On December 30, 1922, Lenin formed the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, where his Communist Party ruled the country.
October 29, 1929 New York Stock Market crashed on Black Tuesday where stocks tumbled across the board. It was the most disastrous trading day in the stock market's history. Billions of dollars in open market values were wiped out.
September 1, 1939 Germany invaded Poland overrunning it in four weeks. Britain & France declared war on Germany two days later.
December 7, 1941 Japan attacks Pearl Harbor by surprise. United States enters World War II.
June 6, 1944 General Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969) led the Allied Invasion of Normandy on D-Day. 2.9 million Allied troops, 15,000 planes, and 5000 ships were mobilized in crossing the English Channel to land on the beaches of Normandy. Paris was liberated from German rule on August 25 and Brussels on September 2.
September 3, 1945 After the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9), Japan officially surrendered on August 15, and formally on September 3 when the signing took place aboard the U.S. battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
October 1, 1949 Chinese Communist Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (1893-1976) declared his country the People's Republic of China after defeating Chiang Kai-Shek's Kuomingtang forces who fled to Taiwan.
April 12, 1961 Soviet Union's Yuri A. Gagarin (1934-1968) became the first man to complete an orbit of Earth. The first American to orbit the Earth was John Glenn on February 20, 1962.
July 20, 1969 Neil Armstrong became the first human to set foot on the Moon.
November 1989 German people attacked the Berlin Wall, chipping it with hammers and bashing it with rocks until the wall came tumbling down. On October 3, 1990, the German Democratic Republic ceased to exist, and the first unified German elections in 58 years were held in December 1990.
October 1990 Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. He wrote the first WWW client (a browser-editor running under NeXTStep) and the first WWW server along with most of the communications software, defining URLs, HTTP and HTML.
December 25, 1991 The hammer & sickle red flag that symbolized 75 years of Soviet communism was lowered for the last time and replaced by 15 flags of 15 newly-independent republics. On January 1, 1992, the Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist party officially ceased to exist.

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