1245 – Thomas, the first known Bishop of Finland, is granted resignation after confessing to torture and forgery.
1613 – Mikhail I is unanimously elected Tsar by a national assembly,beginning the Romanov dynasty of Imperial Russia.
1804 – The first self-propelling steam locomotive makes its outing at the Pen-y-Darren Ironworks in Wales.
1848 – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish The Communist Manifesto.
1878 – The first telephone directory is issued in New Haven, Ct.
1885 – The newly completed Washington Monument is dedicated.
1918 – The last Carolina parakeet dies in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo.
1921 – Rezā Shāh takes control of Tehran during a successful coup
1925 – The New Yorker publishes its first issue. Yes, The New Yorker
1947 – In New York City, Edwin Land demonstrates the first “instant camera”, the Polaroid Land Camera, to a meeting of the Optical Society of America.
1952 – The British government, under Winston Churchill, abolishes identity cards in the UK to “set the people free”.
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Malcolm X
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1965 – Malcolm X is assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City.
1972 – President Richard Nixon visits the People’s Republic of China to normalize Sino-American relations.
1972 – The Soviet unmanned spaceship Luna 20 lands on the Moon.
1975 – Watergate scandal: Former United States Attorney General John N. Mitchell and former White House aides H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman are sentenced to prison.
1995 – Steve Fossett lands in Leader, Saskatchewan, Canada becoming the first person to make a solo flight across the Pacific Ocean in a balloon.
Births
1397 – Isabella of Portugal (d. 1471)
1621 – Rebecca Nurse, Massachusetts colonist, executed as a witch (d. 1692)
1788 – Francis Ronalds, British scientist, inventor and engineer who was knighted for developing the first working electric telegraph (d. 1873)
1821 – Charles Scribner I, publisher, founded Charles Scribner’s Sons (d. 1871)
1903 – Anaïs Nin, French-American essayist and memoirist (d. 1977)
1907 – W. H. Auden, poet, playwright, and composer (d. 1973)
1924 – Dorothy Blum, American computer scientist and cryptanalyst (d. 1980)
1962 – David Foster Wallace, novelist, writer, and essayist (d. 2008)
Deaths
4 AD – Gaius Caesar, Roman consul and grandson of Augustus (b. 20 BC)
1965 – Malcolm X, American minister and activist (b. 1925)