1675 – New York Fishing Company becomes the first American commercial corporation chartered
1790 – President George Washington delivers the first State of the Union Address in New York City. The annual message was delivered in person until 1801, when Thomas Jefferson discontinued the practice because it appeared too similar to a monarch making a speech from a throne. The address was instead written and delivered to congress to be read by a clerk. Woodrow Wilson re-established Washington’s practice in 1913
1806 – Lewis and Clark find skeleton of a one-hundred and five foot blue whale in Oregon
1838 – First telegraph message sent using dots and dashes is sent from New Jersey
1867 – African American men are granted the right to vote in Washington, D.C.
1877 – Crazy Horse and his warriors fight their last battle with the United States Cavalry at Wolf Mountain
1906 – A landslide in Haverstraw, New York, caused by the excavation of clay along the Hudson River, kills twenty people
1954 – Elvis Presley pays four dollars to a Sun Records in Memphis to record his first
two songs, “Casual Love” and “I’ll Never Stand in Your Way”
1958 – Cuban revolutionary forces capture Havana
1964 – President Lyndon B. Johnson declares “War on Poverty”
1998 – World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Ahmed Yousef sentenced to life
2008 – New Jersey officially apologizes for slavery, becoming the first Northern state to do so
Birthdays
1935 – Elvis Aaron Presley, Tupelo Miss, singer
1942 – Stephen Hawking, English physicist
Deaths
1324 – Marco Polo, Venetian explorer, dies at sixty-nine
1642 – Galileo Galilei, Italian physicist and astronomer, dies at seventy-seven in Italy