1769 – An expedition led by Gaspar de Portolá establishes a base in California and sets out to find the Port of Monterey (now Monterey, California).
1789 – French Revolution: Citizens of Paris storm the Bastille.
1798 – The Sedition Act becomes law in the United States making it a federal crime to write, publish, or utter false or malicious statements about the United States government.
1853 – Opening of the first major US world’s fair, the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations in New York City.
1881 – Billy the Kid is shot and killed by Pat Garrett outside Fort Sumner.
1965 – The Mariner Four flyby of Mars takes the first close-up photos of another planet.
1976 – Capital punishment is abolished in Canada.
2015 – P5+1 and Iran agree on final provisions of Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) in regards to the latter’s nuclear program.
President Eisenhower helped kickstart Iran’s nuclear programming on March 5, 1957, when a “proposed agreement for cooperation in research in the peaceful uses of atomic energy” was announced under the auspices of Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program.
Following the Iranian Revolution in 1979, most of the international nuclear cooperation was shut off. For the next few decades, the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) continued its nuclear program without approval by much of the international community. Suspicions arose that Iran was creating and compiling nuclear weapons after the 2003 International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) first reported that Iran had not declared sensitive enrichment and reprocessing activities.
The framework of the JCPOA lifts many of the economic sanctions off Iran as long as Iran destroys its stockpile of medium-enriched uranium, reduces the number of its gas centrifuges by about two-thirds, among various other settlements to assure the international community that they will use its nuclear program for peaceful reasons only.
Births
1454 – Poliziano, Italian poet, and scholar (d. 1494)
1910 – William Hanna, American animator, director, producer, and actor co-founded Hanna-Barbera (d. 2001)
1912 – Woody Guthrie, American singer-songwriter and guitarist (Almanac Singers) (d. 1967)
1913 – Gerald Ford, U.S. Navy lieutenant commander, lawyer, 38th President of the United States (d. 2006)
Deaths
1881 – Billy the Kid, American criminal (b. 1859)
1904 – Paul Kruger, South African politician, Fifth President of the South African Republic (b. 1824)
1986 – Raymond Loewy, French-American industrial designer (b. 1893)