1922: In Egypt’s Valley of the Kings in Thebes, British archaeologist Howard Carter and his men, after a 33-year search, find the entrance to King Tutankhamun’s tomb.
1942: During World War II, the second Battle of El Alamein in northern Egypt ended in defeat for the Axis as German Field Marshal Edwin Rommel was forced to retreat to Tunis after an onslaught by the British Eighth Army under the command of Bernard Montgomery.
1952: The U.S. Government, by orders of President Harry Truman, establishes the National Security Agency, a Pentagon-based spy agency tasked with spying on foreign countries’ communications. Its listening posts were originally trained on the Soviet Union and its satellites, but by the 1990s, and especially after 2001, the agency focused its antennas on the Middle East and the Islamic world.
1973: In response to OPEC’s oil embargo following the Yom Kippur War, the Netherlands declares its first “car-free Sunday”: Cities and highways are deserted in consequence, replaced by pedestrians and cyclists.
1979: The Iranian hostage crisis begins as Iranian militants in Tehran, most of them student followers of the Ayatollah Khomeini, storm the American embassy and take 90 hostages. All but 52 Americans are released. The remaining 52 are held 444 days, and finally released on Jan. 20, 1981, the day Ronald Reagan is inaugurated president of the United States.
1995: Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is assassinated by Yigal Amir, a right-wing extremist and Orthodox Jew opposed to Rabin’s peace overtures toward the Palestinians.
- Profile: Yitzhak Rabin
- Yitzhak Rabin’s Assassination
- Yitzhak Rabin’s Last Words
- Bill Clinton’s Eulogy at Rabin’s Funeral
- Palmach, the Elite Fighting Force that Gave Rabin His Start
- List of Israel’s Prime Ministers Since 1948
2008: Barack Hussein Obama, born of a black Muslim Kenyan father and a white American woman from Kansas, is elected the 44th president of the United States—the first minority president of a democracy in history.