Person report

★15 May 1864
American Civil War: A small Confederate force, which included cadets from the Virginia Military Institute, forced the Union Army out of the Shenandoah Valley.

★29 Dec 1876
A railway bridge over the Ashtabula River in Ohio collapsed when a Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway train was crossing over it, killing 92 people and injuring 64 others.

★13 Jan 1884
Welsh physician William Price was arrested for attempting to cremate his deceased infant son; he was acquitted in the subsequent trial, which led to the legalisation of cremation in the United Kingdom.

★26 Jun 1886
French chemist Henri Moissan reported he was able to successfully isolate elemental fluorine, for which he later won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

★15 Nov 1889
Brazilian Emperor Pedro II was overthrown in a coup led by Deodoro da Fonseca, and Brazil was proclaimed a republic.

★03 Apr 1895
The libel trial instigated by Irish author Oscar Wilde began, eventually resulting in Wilde's arrest, trial and imprisonment on charges of gross indecency.

★16 Jun 1904
Irish author James Joyce began his relationship with Nora Barnacle, and subsequently used the date to set the actions for his 1922 novel Ulysses.

★28 Feb 1914
In the aftermath of the Balkan Wars, Greeks living in southern Albania proclaimed the Autonomous Republic of Northern Epirus.

★20 May 1927
By the Treaty of Jeddah, the United Kingdom recognized the sovereignty of King Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia over Hejaz and Nejd, which later merged to become Saudi Arabia.

★24 Oct 1929
On "Black Thursday", the New York Stock Exchange lost 11 percent of its value at the opening bell on very heavy trading, marking the beginning of the Great Depression.

Historical data by Wikipedia Contributors CC BY-SA 3.0.