1820 – The Missouri Compromise is signed into law by President James Monroe. The compromise allowed Missouri to enter the Union as a slave state and brought Maine into the Union as a free state, and made the rest of the northern part of the Louisiana Purchase slavery-free
1836 – Battle of the Alamo: After a thirteen-day siege by an army of 3,000 Mexican troops, the 187 Texas volunteers, including frontiersman Davy Crockett and colonel Jim Bowie, defending the Alamo are killed and the fort is captured.
1857 – The Supreme Court rules in the Dred Scott v. Sandford case that a slave could not sue for his freedom even though his owner died in a so-called “free state.”
1869 – Dimitri Mendeleev presents the first periodic table to the Russian Chemical Society.
1933 – President Franklin Roosevelt declared a national banking holiday in an effort to shore up the banking system.
1951 – The trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg begins.
