- 1525 – Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec Emperor, is tortured and killed by Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés
- 1708 – A slave revolt in Long Island results in seven White deaths. Two Black male slaves and an Indian slave were hanged and a Black woman was burned alive.
- 1784 – John Wesley charters first Methodist Church in US.
- 1827 – Baltimore, Maryland merchants chartered the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the first railroad in America to offer commercial service to both people and freight.
- 1850 – The University of Utah opens in Salt Lake City.
- 1859 – The Arkansas legislature requires free Blacks to choose between exile and enslavement.
- 1861 – Congress creates the Colorado Territory.
- 1898 – Molly Picon, Yiddish actress, is born. She performed around the world beginning with “Baby Margaret” at age 5, entertained troops in Korea and Japan during World War II, was renowned for her somersaults and flips well into her seventies, wrote one-woman show, “Hello, Molly” (1979), and an autobiography, Molly (1980).
- 1909 – First National Women’s Day is observed in the United States.
- 1935 – Dr. Wallace Carothers develops the synthetic polymer nylon.
- 1940 – Mario Andretti is born.
- 1953 – James Watson, Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin discover the double-helix structure of DNA. Watson and Crick get the credit and win a Nobel prize.
- 1983 – The final episode of M*A*S*H airs, concluding an 11 season run. A whopping 77% of the television-viewing audience tuned in. I know I did. Did you?
- 1987 – Gorbachev calls for nuclear weapons treaty.
- 1989 – Philip Emeagwali, a Nigerian-American computer scientist, is awarded the Gordon Bell Prize (computing’s Nobel Prize) for solving one of the most difficult problems in the computing field. “My focus is not on solving nature’s deeper mysteries. It is on using nature’s deeper mysteries to solve important societal problems.”
- 1993 – ATF raids the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas.
- 2009 – Paul Harvey dies at age 90. And that’s the rest of the story.
- 2011 – Jane Russell dies at age 89.
- 2012 – Discovery of the largest prehistoric penguin, Kairuku grebneffi, at nearly 5ft tall.
- 2013 – Pope Benedict resigns.
