This day in history: 29 Jun

1534: Jacques Cartier made the European discovery of Prince Edward Island.

1613: The original Globe Theatre, in London, was destroyed by fire.

1644: Charles I of England defeated a Parliamentarian led by Sir William Waller at the Battle of Cropredy Bridge - the last battle won by an English King on English soil.

1864: 99 people were killed when an immigrant train failed to stop at an open bridge and fell into the Richelieu River near Beloeil, Quebec.



1880: King Pomare V (1842–1891) was forced to cede the sovereignty of Tahiti and its dependencies to France.

1956: President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, officially creating the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways (aka the Interstate Highway System).

1995: Atlantis, launched on 27 June as mission STS-71 (Robert L Gibson, Charles J Precourt, Ellen S Baker, Bonnie J Dunbar and Gregory J Harbaugh*), became the first space shuttle to dock with the Russian space station Mir.
That same day, 501 people were killed and 937 injured when the Sampoong Department Store, in Seoul, South Korea, collapsed.

Margaret Beaufort (1443–1509), Henry Clay (1777–1852), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861), Roscoe Arbuckle (1887–1933), Ignacy Jan Paderewski GBE (1860-1941), Bob Crane (1928–1978), Lana Turner (1921–1995), Rosemary Clooney (1928–2002) and Katharine Hepburn (1907–2003) died on this date.

And happy birthday to George Goethals (1858-1928), Ludwig Beck (1880–1944), Frank Loesser (1910-1969), Slim Pickens (1919-1983) and Ray Harryhausen (1920-TBD).



* Atlantis had also carried cosmonauts Anatoly Y Solovyev and Nikolai M Budarin up to relieve Norman E Thagard, Vladimir N Dezhurov and Gennady M Strekalov as space-station crew. The photo shows all ten people: (front, left to right) Dezhurov, Gibson and Solovyev, and (back, left to right) Thagard, Strekalov, Harbaugh, Baker, Precourt, Dunbar and Budarin.