- 1779 – Congress establishes the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
- 1903 – Dorothy Schiff, owner and publisher of the New York Post, is born. She sold the Post for an estimated $30 million to Rupert Murdock in 1976.
- 1904 – Hilde Bruch is born. She escaped from Nazi Germany in 1933 to England and then America. Her pioneer work made her the leading expert in eating disorders, especially anorexia nervosa.
- 1918 – US Army mess cook Private Albert Gitchell of Fort Riley, Kansas becomes the first documented case of a new flu. It’s the start of a worldwide pandemic that killed 50-100 million/
- 1921 – Charlotte Friend, a microbiologist in the 1950s at Sloan-Kettering Institute, was born today. She discovered a link between defective maturation and tumor growth in mice — discoveries that were critical in establishing the role of viruses in some cancers.
- 1941 – FDR signs the Lend-Lease Bill which lends money to Britain for their war effort.
- 1968 – Otis Redding is the first person in the US to posthumously receive gold record for his single “Sittin’ On the Dock of the Bay”
- 1985 – Mikhail Gorbachev replaces Konstantin Chernenko as Soviet leader.
- 1997 – The ashes of Star Trek creator, Gene Roddenberry are launched into space.
- 2006 – Michelle Bachelet is inaugurated as the first female president of Chile.
- 2011 – 8.9 earthquake hits Japan, triggering a tsunami killing thousands of people and causing the second worst nuclear accident in history at Fukushima nuclear plant.
- 2018 – Superhero movie “The Black Panther” becomes the fifth Marvel movie to earn $1 billion worldwide.
- 2020
- COVID-19 declared a pandemic by the head of the World Health Organization Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, with 121,564 cases worldwide and 4,373 deaths.
- NBA suspends 2019-20 season until further notice after Utah Jazz center Rudy Gobert tests positive for COVID-19.
- President Trump announces 30-day ban on travel to the US.
- Dow Jones drops 20%
- Harvey Weinstein is sentenced to 23 years in prison for a criminal sex act and rape in New York
