01011116 This Day In History, November 16

42 BC: Tiberius Claudius Nero was born. Tiberius was the Roman Emperor at the time of the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ (see A History Of Jerusalem: Pompey And The Caesars). The predecessor of Tiberius, Augustus, was the Emperor at the time of the Messiah's birth, as recorded in the Bible (see Does Rome Have Christ's Birth Certificate?).

1272: King Henry III of England, who had ruled since 1216, died and was succeeded by his son Edward I.

1532: Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro and his army captured Inca Emperor Atahualpa at the Battle of Cajamarca.

1621: The Pope proclaimed January 1st to be the beginning of the Roman calendar year. Before that time, March was the first month - the reason why a number of today's Roman calendar month names are misnomers e.g. September ("sept" is a prefix meaning "seven") went from being the seventh month to the ninth (see Pope Gregory's Calendar and The Blasphemy Calendar; listen also to our Sermon Do We Use The 'Hebrew' Calendar?).

1686: Britain and France signed the Treaty of Neutrality regarding their colonies in North America in the event of war in Europe. France later supported the revolution of the New England colonies against Britain, not for any purpose of "freedom" (at the very same time that the France-supported revolution in New England happened, France hypocritically had its own colonies in Louisiana and elsewhere in North America - in which France tolerated no independence), but with the intention of conquering New England for France after the colonies became independent of British military support. Later costly wars in Europe, started by the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, diverted French military forces from North America.

1797: Frederick William II, king of Prussia from 1786, died and was succeeded by his son, Frederick William III.

1885: Louis Riel, the rebel leader of the "Riel Rebellion" in Canada, was executed for treason.

1894: Over 6,000 Armenians were reported massacred by Turks in Kurdistan.

1904: English electrical engineer and physicist John Ambrose Fleming received a patent for the "thermionic valve" (later known as the vacuum tube).

1918: With the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the end of the First World War (listen to our Sermons The Ottoman Empire and The European World Wars), Hungary was proclaimed an independent republic.

1938: The hallucinogenic drug LSD was first synthesized by Swiss chemist Dr. Albert Hofmann at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland.

1945: At the end of the Second World War, many prominent Nazi scientists who worked for Adolf Hitler's war and holocaust regime (see also Presidential Quotes On War, Terrorism, Religion) were admitted into the U.S. The "reformed" Nazis (many people, at the time and ever since, nevertheless regarded them as war criminals who escaped justice, including Jewish concentration camp survivors who were victims of some of their "experiments") later worked for various government and military agencies, including NASA and nuclear missile programs.

1960: Riots occurred in New Orleans after two all-white schools began allowing blacks to attend classes.

1965: The Soviet Union launched its Venus III spacecraft. Its arrival on Venus in March, 1966 made it the first spacecraft to land on another planet.

1988: Benazir Bhutto was elected Prime Minister of Pakistan; she was assassinated in 2007.