1971 Two men and two children were killed and nineteen others injured, some seriously, in an IRA no-warning bomb attack on a furniture showroom on the Shankill Road, Belfast.
1920 Following an IRA ambush near Victoria Barracks in Cork, Auxiliaries and Black and Tans went on the rampage, looting and setting fire to large parts of the city centre, including City Hall. Over five acres of property, valued at £20 million, were destroyed.
1936 King Edward VIII abdicated after a reign of just ten months, prompting the biggest constitutional crisis for the British monarchy in the twentieth century.
1920 The IRA ambushed an RIC patrol near Victoria Barracks, Cork. Black and Tans later set fire to parts of the city. The government claimed that the arson was inflicted by citizens of Cork, but later paid £3m compensation.
1918 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russian novelist, historian and short-story writer—notably of The Gulag Archipelago (1973)—and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1970), born.
1862 The Battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia, during which the Irish Brigade secured its reputation for gallantry with a suicidal charge against impregnable Confederate defences, began. The four-day engagement ended in victory for General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia.
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Personal Histories
Personal Histories is an initiative by History Ireland,
which aims to capture the individual histories of Irish
people both in Ireland and around the world. It is hoped
to build an extensive database reflecting Irish lives,
giving them a chance to be heard, remembered and to
add their voice to the historical record.
Click Here to go to the Personal Histories page
1901 Thomas Clarke Luby, co-founder of the Fenian movement and editor of the Irish People (1863–5), died in New York.
1955 Rosa Parks, the ‘first lady of civil rights’, was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for resisting bus segregation by refusing to obey a bus driver’s order that she give up her seat in the ‘coloured’ section to a white passenger after the ‘white’ section was filled.
1972 A bus driver and bus conductor were killed and over 100 others were injured when two UVF bombs exploded in Dublin city centre. Fine Gael consequently dropped their opposition to Fianna Fáil’s Offences Against the State (Amendment) Bill, then being debated in Dáil Éireann.