• 41 - After a night of negotiation, Claudius is accepted as Roman Emperor by the Senate.
• 1327 - Edward III becomes King of England.
• 1494 - Alfonso II becomes King of Naples.
• 1533 - Henry VIII of England secretly marries his second wife Anne Boleyn.
• 1554 - Founding of São Paulo city, Brazil.
• 1573 - Battle of Mikatagahara, in Japan; Takeda Shingen defeats Tokugawa Ieyasu.
• 1755 - Moscow University established on Tatiana Day.
• 1787 - American Daniel Shays leads rebellion to seize Federal arsenal to protest debtor's prisons.
• 1791 - The British Parliament passes the Constitutional Act of 1791 and splits the old province of Quebec into Upper and Lower Canada.
• 1792 - The London Corresponding Society is founded.
• 1858 - The Wedding March by Felix Mendelssohn becomes a popular wedding recessional after it's played on this day at the marriage of Queen Victoria's daughter, Victoria, and Friedrich of Prussia.
• 1879 - The Bulgarian National Bank is founded.
• 1881 - Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell form the Oriental Telephone Company.
• 1890 - Nellie Bly completes her round-the-world journey in 72 days.
• 1909 - Richard Strauss' opera Elektra receives its debut performance at the Dresden State Opera.
• 1915 - Alexander Graham Bell inaugurates U.S. transcontinental telephone service.
• 1917 - The Danish West Indies is sold to the United States for $25 million.
• 1919 - The League of Nations is founded.
• 1924 - The 1924 Winter Olympics open in Chamonix, France (in the French Alps), inaugurating the Winter Olympic Games.
• 1937 - The Guiding Light airs on radio for the first time. Also went to television making this show the longest running broadcast program in United States radio and television history.
• 1941 - Pope Pius XII elevates the Apostolic Vicariate of the Hawaiian Islands to the dignity of a diocese. It becomes the Roman Catholic Diocese of Honolulu.
• 1942 - World War II: Thailand declares war on the United States and United Kingdom.
• 1945 - World War II: Battle of the Bulge ends.
• 1946 - The United Mine Workers rejoins the American Federation of Labor.
• 1949 - At the Hollywood Athletic Club the first Emmy Awards are presented.
• 1949 - The first Israeli election -- David Ben-Gurion becomes Prime Minister.
• 1955 - Soviet Union ends state of war with Germany.
• 1959 - Pope John XXIII proclaims upcoming Second Vatican Council.
• 1960 - The National Association of Broadcasters reacts to the Payola scandal by threatening fines for any disc jockeys who accepted money for playing particular records.
• 1961 - In Washington, D.C. John F. Kennedy delivers the first live presidential television news conference.
• 1971 - Charles Manson and three female "Family" members are found guilty of the 1969 Tate-LaBianca murders.
• 1971 - Idi Amin leads a coup deposing Milton Obote and becomes Uganda's president.
• 1971 - Himachal Pradesh becomes the 18th Indian state.
• 1981 - Jiang Qing, the widow of Mao Zedong, is sentenced to death.
• 1986 - The National Resistance Movement topple the government of Tito Okello in Uganda.
• 1990 - The Burns' Day storm hits northwestern Europe.
• 1990 - Honduras becomes a member of the Berne Convention copyright treaty.
• 1990 - Avianca Flight 52 crashes, killing 73 passengers.
• 1993 - Five people were shot outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia resulting in two murders.
• 1994 - The Clementine space probe launches.
• 1995 - The Norwegian Rocket Incident: Russia almost launches a nuclear attack after it mistakes Black Brant XII, a Norwegian research rocket, for a US Trident missile.
• 1998 - During a historic visit to Cuba Pope John Paul II demands the release of political prisoners and political reforms while condemning US attempts to isolate the country.
• 1998 - Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) suicide attack on Sri Lanka's Temple of the Tooth, killing 8 people injuring 25 others.
• 1999 - A 6.0 Richter scale earthquake hits western Colombia killing at least 1,000.
• 2001 - A 50-year-old Douglas DC-3 crashes near Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela killing 24.
• 2002 - Wikipedia switches to the new version of its software ("Phase II") aka .
• 2004 - Opportunity rover (MER-B) lands on surface of Mars.
• 2005 - A stampede at the Mandher Devi temple in Mandhradevi in India kills at least 258.
• 2006 - Three independent observing campaigns announce the discovery of OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb through gravitational microlensing, the first cool rocky/icy extrasolar planet around a main-sequence star.
• 2008 - Dennis Kucinichends his bid for the presidency (United States).

Births