538 – Vitiges, king of the Ostrogoths ends his siege of Rome and retreats to Ravenna, leaving the city in the hands of the victorious Byzantine general, Belisarius
1894 – Coca-Cola is bottled and sold for the first time in Vicksburg, Mississippi, by local soda fountain operator Joseph A. Biedenharn.
1918 – Moscow becomes the capital of Russia again after Saint Petersburg held this status for 215 years.
1930 – Mahatma Gandhi begins the Salt March, a 200-mile march to the sea to protest the British monopoly on salt in India
1933 – Great Depression: Franklin D. Roosevelt addresses the nation for the first time as President of the United States. This is also the first of his “fireside chats”.
1993 – Several bombs explode in Mumbai, India, killing about 300 and injuring hundreds more.
1993 – North Korea nuclear weapons program: North Korea says that it plans to withdraw from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and refuses to allow inspectors access to its nuclear sites.
2009 – Financier Bernard Madoff pleads guilty in New York to scamming $18 billion, the largest in Wall Street’s history.
2011 – A reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant melts and explodes and releases radioactivity into the atmosphere a day after Japan’s earthquake.
2014 – A gas explosion in East Harlem kills eight and injures 70 others.
Births
1386 – Ashikaga Yoshimochi, Japanese shogun (d. 1428)
1672 – Richard Steele, Irish-Welsh journalist and politician (d. 1729)
1806 – Jane Pierce, 15th First Lady of the United States (d. 1863)
1831 – Clement Studebaker, businessman, co-founded Studebaker (d. 1901)
1858 – Adolph Ochs, American publisher (d. 1935)
1915 – Alberto Burri, Italian painter and sculptor (d. 1995)
1918 – Elaine de Kooning, American painter and academic (d. 1989)
1922 – Jack Kerouac, American author and poet (d. 1969)
1928 – Edward Albee, American director and playwright (d. 2016)
1946 – Liza Minnelli, American actress, singer, and dancer
1947 – Mitt Romney, politician, 70th Governor of Massachusetts
1948 – James Taylor, American singer-songwriter and guitarist
Deaths
417 – Innocent I, pope of the Catholic Church
1955 – Charlie Parker, American saxophonist and composer (b. 1920)
2015 – Michael Graves, American architect and academic, designed the Portland Building and the Humana Building (b. 1934)