On this day in history
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Source: HistoryNet.com
1494: Christopher Columbus lands on the island of Jamaica, which he names Santa Gloria.
1821: Napoleon Bonaparte dies in exile on the island of St. Helena.
1862: Mexican forces loyal to Benito Juarez defeat troops sent by Napoleon III in the Battle of Puebla.
1886: A bomb explodes on the fourth day of a workers' strike in Chicago.
1912: Soviet Communist Party newspaper Pravda begins publishing.
1916: U.S. Marines invade the Dominican Republic.
1920: Anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are arrested for murder.
1935: American Jesse Owens sets the long jump record.
1942: General Joseph Stilwell learns that the Japanese have cut his railway out of China and is forced to lead his troops into India.
1945: Holland and Denmark are liberated from Nazi control.
1961: Alan Shepard becomes the first American in space.
1968: U.S. Air Force planes hit Nhi Ha, South Vietnam in support of attacking infantrymen.
1969: Pulitzer Prize awarded to Norman Mailer for his 'nonfiction novel' Armies of the Night, an account of the 1967 anti-Vietnam War march on the Pentagon.
1987: Congress opens Iran-Contra hearings.
2000: The Sun, Earth, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn align – Earth's moon is also almost in this alignment – leading to Doomsday predictions of massive natural disasters, although such a 'grand confluence' occurs about once in every century.
