In history, year 2004 has its own importance and known for many memorable events like famous birthdays, inventions, natural disaster, treaties, change of rulers, special days etc. Find below a list of important historical events which happened during the year 2004.
| Date/Month | Event / Incidence / Incident |
|---|
| 01 january | The new team USC Trojans won victory over the team Michigan Wolverines in Rose Bowl. |
| 02 january | The Stardust space probe flew by the comet Wild 2 and collected particle samples from its coma, which were later returned to Earth. |
| 04 january | Spiri, the first of two roversof NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Mission, landed successfully on Mars at 04:35 Ground UTC. |
| 08 january | RMS Queen Mary 2 at the time the longest, widestand tallest passenger ship ever built, was christened by her namesake'sgranddaughter, Queen Elizabeth II. |
| 09 january | Twenty-eight illegal Albanian emigrants died when their inflatable boat installed near the Karaburun Peninsula while on the way to Brindisi, Italy. |
| 10 january | Helge Fossmo, the village priest of Knut, Sweden,orchestrated the murders of his wife and his neighbor, a crime that shocked the country. |
| 25 january | Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity landed on Mars and rolled into Eagle crater, a small crater onthe Meridiani Planum. |
| 29 january | In the 16th academy awards Oscar ceremonies Sean Penn and Charlize Theron win lead acting awards sweeping all the eleven nominations like Billy Crystal's hosts Lord of the kings. The return of the King. |
| 01 february | During the halftime show of Super Bowl XXXVIII, JanetJackson's breast was exposed by Justin Timberlake in what was laterreferred to as a 'wardrobe malfunction', resulting in an immediatecrackdown and widespread debate on perceived indecency in U.S.broadcasting. |
| 02 february | Swiss tennis player Roger Federer became the No. 1 ranked men'ssingles player, a position he held for a record 237 weeks. |
| 04 february | Four Harvard University students launched the popular social networking website Facebook from their dorm room. |
| 05 february | The Revolutionary Artibonite Resistance Front capturedGonaïves, Haiti, starting a coup d'état against the government ofPresident Jean-Bertrand Aristide. |
| 08 february | Major awards of 46th grammy awards are won by cold play, Out Kast, Richard mann, Luther Vandross Christina Aguilera and Justin Timber Lake. |
| 27 february | The initial version of the John Jay Report, with details aboutthe Catholic sexual abuse scandal in the United States, was released. |
| 29 february | In the 16th Academy Awards Oscar Ceremony, Sean Penn and Charlize Theron won lead acting awards sweeping all the eleven nominations like Billy Crystals hosts, Lord of the Rings, The return of the King. |
| 11 march | A series of simultaneous bombings on Cercanías commuter train skilled 191 people and wounded more than 1,800 in Madrid. |
| 01 april | Google launched a free Web-based service that essentially provides users with an unprecedented 1000 megabytes of storage for spam. |
| 22 april | Flammable cargo exploded at Yeongcheon Station in Ryongchon, North Korea, killing 160 people. |
| 30 april | The New Yorker magazine posted an article and supportingpictures online, postdated May 10, detailing accounts of torture andabuse by American personnel of prisoners held at the Abu Ghraib prisonin Baghdad. |
| 01 may | 2004 enlargement of European Union occurred on 1 May as Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia joined the EU. It was the largest single expansion of the European Union, in terms of territory, number of states and population. |
| 06 may | Finale episode of 10th and final season of television sitcom friends was aired on May 6, 2004 on NBC in United States. This episode is the sixth most watched overall television series fianle in US television history. |
| 07 may | NicK Berg, an American Businessman, was beheaded on May 7, 2004 by the militant jihadist group Muntada al-Ansar. The militant group posted a video titled ‘Abu Musab al-Zarawi slaughters an Americam’, which was about five and half minutes long, showing decapitation of him. |
| 09 may | Akhmad Kadyrov, the first President of the Chechen Republic,and about 30 others were killed by a bomb during a World War II memorial victory parade in Grozny. |
| 14 may | The South Korean Constitutional Court overturned the impeachment charges on Roh Moo-hyun on May 14, 2004, restoring him as President. He was accused of illegal electioneering but this incident made him and Uri Party even more popular and Uri Party became the ruling party. |
| 17 may | Massachusetts became the first US state to issue same-sex marriage licence on May 17, 2004. Massachusetts is the sixth place in the world to legalize same-sex marriage after the Netherland, Belgium, Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec. |
| 17 may | Massachusetts became the first U.S. state to legalize same-sexmarriage. |
| 28 may | Ayad Allawi was unanimously elected by the Iraqi GoverningCouncil to be the interim Prime Minister of Iraq. |
| 04 june | In Granby, Colorado, US, Marvin Heemeyer went on a rampage witha modified bulldozer over a zoning dispute, destroying several buildingsbefore committing suicide. |
| 06 june | Tamil was declared as classical language of India by President APJ Abdul Kalam. This decision was taken after the joint parliamentary meeting in which the both houses of parliament took part- the Loksabha and the Rajyasabha. |
| 11 june | Cassini–Huygens makes its closest flyby of the Saturn’s moon Phoebe. Cassini–Huygens is an unmanned spacecraft sent to the planet Saturn. It is a flagship-class NASA–ESA–ASI robotic spacecraft. Cassini is the fourth space probe to visit Saturn and the first to enter its orbit. Its mission is still ongoing as of 2015. |