Emperor Diocletian, urged on by his co-emperor Galerius, issued an edict demanding that Christian churches be razed, sacred texts burned, and Christians stripped of legal rights and government office. It marked the opening of the last and most severe wave of Roman persecution before Constantine's later toleration, producing a generation of martyrs venerated for centuries afterward.
A group of armed former Confederate guerrillas, believed to include members of the James-Younger Gang, held up the Clay County Savings Association in Liberty, Missouri, making off with roughly $60,000 in cash and bonds. A bystander, George Wymore, was shot dead as the gang fled, marking one of the first violent bank robberies of its kind in the postwar United States and launching the outlaw legend that would surround Jesse James.
A British 'Punitive Expedition' captured and burned Benin City, capital of the Kingdom of Benin in present-day Nigeria, in retaliation for an earlier ambush of a British delegation. Troops looted the royal palace of thousands of brass, bronze, and ivory artworks, dispersing masterpieces of West African art into European museums and private collections, where many remain the subject of restitution demands today.
The Military Service Act 1916, passed by Parliament in January, took full effect, requiring unmarried British men between 18 and 41 to enlist for service unless exempted. It ended Britain's long-standing reliance on volunteer forces, a shift driven by staggering casualties on the Western Front that volunteer recruitment alone could no longer replace.
Physicist Robert H. Goddard fired 'Nell,' a spindly rocket powered by liquid oxygen and gasoline, from a farm in Auburn, Massachusetts. It climbed just 41 feet and flew for 2.5 seconds before crashing 184 feet away, but the flight proved liquid propellant rocketry was possible, laying the theoretical and practical groundwork for the space age decades later.
Members of Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, entered the hamlet of My Lai expecting Viet Cong resistance and instead rounded up and killed hundreds of unarmed civilians, mostly women, children, and the elderly. The massacre was covered up for over a year until Seymour Hersh's reporting and photographs by Ronald Haeberle forced a public reckoning, deepening American disillusionment with the Vietnam War.
Researchers identified a pulsar at the heart of the Crab Nebula, the visible remnant of a supernova recorded by Chinese astronomers in 1054. The discovery, following the first pulsar detection by Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 1967, confirmed the theoretical link between pulsars and supernova remnants, providing direct evidence that neutron stars form in stellar explosions.
Apple Computer released the Lisa, a personal computer aimed at business users that featured a graphical desktop, windows, icons, and a mouse years before such interfaces became standard. Priced at $9,995, roughly $30,000 today, the Lisa sold poorly, but its interface concepts directly shaped the far more successful Macintosh, released the following year.