161 – Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius dies and is succeeded by co-Emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, an unprecedented political arrangement in the Roman Empire
321 – Roman Emperor Constantine I decrees that Solis Invicti (sun-day) is the day of rest in the Empire.
1530 – King Henry VIII’s divorce request is denied by the Pope. Henry then declares that he, not the Pope, is supreme head of England’s church
1774 – British close port of Boston to all commerce
1908 – Cincinnati Mayor Mark Breith stood before city council and announces that, “women are not physically fit to operate automobiles”
1911 – US sends 20,000 troops to Mexican border
1926 – First transatlantic telephone call London to New York
1932 – Riots at Ford-factory Dearborn, Michigan, kills 4
1936 – Hitler breaks Treaty of Versailles, sends troops to Rhineland
1939 – Glamour magazine begins publishing
1941 – Third largest snowfall in NYC history (18.1″)
1973 – Comet (Lubos) Kohoutek discovered at Hamburg Observatory
1989 – Iran drops diplomatic relations with Britain over Salman Rushdie’s book “Satanic Verses”
Birthdays
1659 – Henry Purcell, English organist/composer
1765 – Nicéphore Niépce, French inventor of photography (d. 1833)
1872 – Piet Mondrian, Amersfoort, Netherlands, Dutch abstract painter (Broadway Boogie Woogie)
1893 – Milton Avery, American artist (d. 1965)
Deaths
322 BC – Aristotle, Greek philosopher (b. 384 BC)Aristotle was the ancient Greek philosopher and scientist born in the city of Stagira, Chalkidice, on the northern periphery of Classical Greece
1274 – Thomas Aquinas, Italian thelogian/saint, dies at 48
1967 – Alice B. Toklas, American companion to Gertrude Stein (b. 1877)
1968 – Yuri Aleksayevich Gagarin, USSR cosmonaut (Vostok I), dies at 31
He was the first human to go into outer space and circle the planet. The trip lasted 108 minutes flying at 18,000 miles an hour. One of 20 candidates to be the first man in space, here’s a Soviet Air Force doctor’s evaluation of Yuri:
Modest; embarrasses when his humor gets a little too racy; high degree of intellectual development evident in Yuriy; fantastic memory; distinguishes himself from his colleagues by his sharp and far-ranging sense of attention to his surroundings; a well-developed imagination; quick reactions; persevering, prepares himself painstakingly for his activities and training exercises, handles celestial mechanics and mathematical formulae with ease as well as excels in higher mathematics; does not feel constrained when he has to defend his point of view if he considers himself right; appears that he understands life better than a lot of his friends.” This evaluation and the fact that he was 5 ft 2 inches(for the Vostok spacecraft was rather small) propelled Yuri into space as well as history.
After his epic flight, he was not to fly into space again, for fear that a space accident would be devastating to the Soviet Union. In 1968 he died at the young age of 31, flying a MiG-15 training jet.
Edited from various sources including historyorb.com, the NYTimes.com Wikipedia and other internet searches