Barbados, an island nation in the Caribbean situated about 100 miles (160 km) east of the Windward Islands, had gained internal self-rule in 1961 and achieved its full independence from Britain on this day in 1966.
| 1996: | | | A block of gray sandstone known as the Stone of Scone was returned to Scotland, 700 years after it had been taken to England as war booty by King Edward I. |
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| 1939: | | After Finland refused to grant the Soviet Union a naval base and other concessions in the fall of 1939, Soviet troops totaling about one million men attacked Finland on several fronts, initiating the Russo-Finnish War. |
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| 1936: | | A fire virtually destroyed the Crystal Palace, the giant exhibition hall that housed the Great Exhibition of 1851. |
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| 1924: | | | Politician Shirley Chisholm, the first African American woman to be elected to the U.S. Congress, was born. |
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| 1908: | | The United States and Japan signed the Root-Takahira Agreement, which averted a drift toward possible war through the mutual acknowledgment of certain international policies and spheres of influence in the Pacific. |
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| 1874: | | | British statesman, orator, and author Sir Winston Churchill was born in Oxfordshire, England. |
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| 1782: | | Britain and the United States signed the preliminary articles of the Treaty of Paris as part of the Peace of Paris, a collection of treaties concluding the American Revolution. |
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| 1718: | | | Charles XII, king of Sweden, was killed during a siege of the fortress of Fredriksten, east of Oslo Fjord, ending Sweden's “Age of Greatness.” |
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