Black Day in History

1285 – Philip III of France died of the plague.

1796 – Spain declared war on Britain in the Napoleonic Wars.

1859 – An arsonist sets fire inside New York City’s iron and glass Crystal Palace, the most presitigious museum in the U.S. at the time. It burns to the ground, causing $2M damage and destroying thousands of priceless artifacts.

1877 – After marching for more than 1,400 miles and confronting 2,000 US soldiers along the way, Chief Joseph surrendered with starving remnant of Nez Perce people.

1930 – The British airship R101 crashed on its first flight at Allonne, near Beauvais, France, killing 48 of its 54 passengers.

1942 – German engineer Herman Graebe witnesses a Nazi mass execution in the Ukraine.

1942 – America’s ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’, George M. Cohan, died at age 64.

1954 – Blaming “conflicting career demands” for the breakup of their 9-month marriage, screen actress Marilyn Monroe filed suit for divorce in Santa Monica, California, against baseball star Joe DiMaggio on grounds of mental cruelty

1970 – Anwar Sadat was nominated to succeed Gamal Abdel Nasser as president of Egypt.

1994 – Almost 50 members of the Order of the Solar Temple sect died in two suicide fires in Switzerland.

1998 – Infamous David Letterman stalker, Margaret Ray, age 46, committed suicide by kneeling in front of a train in Colorado.

1999 – In a move reminiscent of a strange combination of Nazi crimes committed against Gypsies and the postwar construction of the Berlin Wall, the town of Usti nad Labem in the Czech Republic begins construction of a wall to separate a portion of its Gypsy population away from more respectable folks.