This Day in History

Sat, 12 Jul 2025

King Henry VIII of England Marries Sixth and Last Wife, Catherine Parr (1543)

By 1543, Henry VIII had had five marriages, which respectively ended in one divorce, one annulment, and three deaths—two by beheading. He then married Parr, his sixth and final wife. She had a good influence on the increasingly paranoid king—her third husband—and developed close friendships with his children, even acting as guardian of one of Henry's daughters after his death in 1547. Why, then, did Parr send her beloved stepdaughter, the future Queen Elizabeth I, away the next year? Discuss

Fri, 11 Jul 2025

Skylab Returns to Earth (1979)

Five years after it was abandoned in orbit, the US space laboratory Skylab began to fall back toward Earth. The impending re-entry and breakup became an international media event, as it was unclear exactly when or where the debris would land. News organizations went so far as to offer rewards for surviving pieces of the spacecraft. The debris finally crashed to Earth in Western Australia, earning NASA a $400 fine for littering from the Shire of Esperance. When was the fine paid?

Thu, 10 Jul 2025

Rubens's Sells for £49.5 million (2002)

Misattributed to an assistant of Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens until 2002, when an expert from Sotheby's auction house identified it as the work of the master himself, Massacre of the Innocents is an early 17th-century painting depicting Herod's slaughter of the infants of Bethlehem. One of two paintings Rubens made of the Biblical scene, it fetched £49.5 million ($76 million) at auction and is one of the priciest paintings ever sold. Its style is reminiscent of which Italian painter?