1611 – The King James Version of the Bible is published for the first time in London, England, by printer Robert Barker. The King James Version (KJV), also known as the King James Bible (KJB) and the Authorized Version, is an Early Modern English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England, which was commissioned in 1604 and published in 1611, by sponsorship of King James VI and I. The 80 books of the KJV include 39 books of the Old Testament, 14 books of Apocrypha, and the 27 books of the New Testament. The KJV does not include a commentary on the text as the King believed that might contain anti-monarchist sentiment as had its predecessor the Geneva Bible.
1670 – King Charles II of England grants a permanent charter to the Hudson’s Bay Company to open up the fur trade in North America. The Hudson’s Bay Company (abbreviated HBC and colloquially Hudson’s Bay) is a Canadian holding company of department stores and commercial property. It was the oldest corporation in North America, founded in 1670 and liquidated in 2025. It was headquartered at the Simpson Tower in Toronto. The founding royal charter, issued by King Charles II, granted the company the right of “sole trade and commerce” over the Rupert’s Land territory, the borders of which were based on the Hudson Bay drainage basin. It controlled the fur trade throughout English and later British North America, and was its de facto government until it relinquished control of the land to Canada in 1869. The company then diversified with the ownership and operation of several retail businesses throughout the latter country. It established its namesake department stores in 1881, the Home Outfitters home furnishings stores in 1999, and acquired the Zellers and Fields discount stores in 1978. It also owned several regional department stores that were eventually converted to The Bay, including Morgan’s, Simpsons, and Woodward’s. Expansions beyond Canada included the United States, where it owned department stores including Lord & Taylor, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Saks Off 5th in the 2010s; and the Netherlands, where it sold its remaining stores in 2019.
1986 – Chernobyl disaster: The City of Chernobyl is evacuated six days after the disaster. At first, the authorities conceded only that a minor accident had occurred, but once they began evacuating more than 100,000 people, the scale of the situation became widely known.
2011 – Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks and the FBI’s most wanted fugitive, is killed by the United States Navy SEALs in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
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