01010904 This Day In History, September 4

476: Romulus Augustulus, 16, the last Emperor of the original Roman Empire (see A History Of Jerusalem: Pompey And The Caesars), was deposed when Odoacer, a German warlord, proclaimed himself the King of Italy. The date is considered by some historians to be the "fall" of the Roman empire, but history and prophecy plainly show how it was merely the fall of the Roman Roman Empire; it thereafter became, by its official title, "The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation" (see The Holy Roman Empire Of The German Nation).

626: Li Shimin, later known as Emperor Taizong of Tang, assumed the throne of the Tang Dynasty of China.

925: The coronation of Athelstan, the first king to rule over all of England.

1189: King Richard I (the Lion-Hearted) of England was crowned in Westminster.

1609: English explorer Henry Hudson discovered a large, heavily wooded, nearly-unpopulated island on the east coast of the continent of North America. Today, it is known as Manhattan.

1774: New Caledonia (a major island east of Australia and north of New Zealand) was first sighted by Europeans, during English explorer James Cook's second voyage.

1781: In what is today southern California, 44 Spanish settlers named their new settlement El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora La Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula ("The Village of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels of Porziuncola"). It is known today by the abbreviation Los Angeles.

1783: The Treaty of Paris was signed to end the war of rebellion between England and the New England colonies that English pioneers created in the undeveloped wilderness centuries earlier.

1820: Czar Nicholas of Russia claimed all territory from Alaska to Oregon, closing all Alaskan waters to foreigners. Russia sold Alaska to the U.S. in 1867. The territory became the 49th U.S. state in 1959.

1886: After 30 years of fighting to defend his native ancestral homeland, to stop the further genocide of native Americans, Apache chief Geronimo surrendered to U.S. troops in Arizona, thereby ending the last major "Indian" war (early explorers from Europe thought that they had arrived in India, and so they incorrectly called the Americans "Indians").

1888: George Eastman patented the first roll-film camera and registered the "Kodak" trademark. Film cameras became obsolete in the late 20th century with the invention of digital photography.

1957: Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus mobilized his National Guard to prevent black students from attending Central High School.

1957: Ford started selling the Edsel, a medium-priced luxury car named after Henry Ford's son. The car proved to be so unpopular that it was discontinued 2 years later, in 1959. Edsels have since become valuable to collectors and museums.

1976: Viking II landed on Mars and transmitted the first close-up, color photographs of the planet's surface.

1984: Brian Mulroney led the Conservative party to the largest victory ever won by a federal party in Canada; 212 out of 282 seats, defeating the Liberals under incumbent Prime Minister John Turner and the NDP (the "New Democratic Party," an even more liberal wing of the Liberal Party) under Ed Broadbent. Prime Minister Mulroney also defeated Turner and Broadbent in the election 4 years later.

1985: The first fullerene (an allotrope of carbon in which the atoms form ball-like structures) molecule of carbon was discovered. It was given the name Buckminsterfullerene.

1998: The Internet search Google was founded by Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

2010: The Canterbury earthquake. A magnitude 7.1 earthquake caused widespread damage on the South Island of New Zealand.