303 – Roman emperor Diocletian orders the destruction of the Christian church in Nicomedia, beginning eight years of Diocletianic Persecution.
532 – Byzantine emperor Justinian I orders the building of a new Orthodox Christian basilica in Constantinople – the Hagia Sophia.
1455 – Traditional date for the publication of the Gutenberg Bible, the first Western book printed with movable type.
1854 – The official independence of the Orange Free State is declared.
The Orange Free State was an independent Boer sovereign republic in south Africa during the second half of the 19th century, and later a British colony. Nothing to do with President Trump.
1861 – President-elect Abraham Lincoln arrives secretly in Washington, D.C., after an alleged assassination plot in Baltimore, Maryland.
1886 – Charles Martin Hall produced the first samples of man-made aluminum, after several years of intensive work. He was assisted in this project by his older sister, Julia Brainerd Hall.
1903 – Cuba leases Guantánamo Bay to the United States “in perpetuity”.
The US pays the Cuban government $4,085 annually in rent for the 45-square-mile naval base at Guantanamo Bay.
1941 – Plutonium is first produced and isolated by Dr. Glenn T. Seaborg.
1942 – World War II: Japanese submarines fire artillery shells at the coastline near Santa Barbara, California.
1945 – World War II: The German town of Pforzheim is annihilated in a raid by 379 British bombers.
1954 – The first mass inoculation of children against polio with the Salk vaccine begins in Pittsburgh.
1980 – Iran hostage crisis: Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini states that Iran’s parliament will decide the fate of the American embassy hostages.
1991 – Gulf War: Ground troops cross the Saudi Arabian border and enter Iraq, thus beginning the ground phase of the war.
2008 – A United States Air Force B-2 Spirit bomber crashes on Guam, marking the first operational loss of a B-2.
Births
1685 – George Frideric Handel, German-English organist and composer (d. 1759)
1878 – Kazimir Malevich, Ukrainian painter and theorist (d. 1935)
Malevich was a Russian painter and a pioneer of geometric abstract art and the originator of the avant-garde Suprematist movement
1915 – Paul Tibbets, American general and pilot (d. 2007)
1929 – Elston Howard, American baseball player and coach (d. 1980)
Deaths
1821 – John Keats, English poet (b. 1795)
1848 – John Quincy Adams, sixth President of the United States (b. 1767)
1855 – Carl Friedrich Gauss, German mathematician, astronomer, and physicist (b. 1777)
