1602 – The Dutch East India Company is established.
1616 – Sir Walter Raleigh is freed from the Tower of London after 13 years of imprisonment.
1726 – Isaac Newton, English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher (b. 1642) died.
1760 – The “Great Fire” of Boston, Massachusetts, destroys 349 buildings.
1815 – After escaping from Elba, Napoleon enters Paris with a regular army of 140,000 and a volunteer force of around 200,000, beginning his “Hundred Days” rule.
1916 – Albert Einstein publishes his general theory of relativity.
1922 – The USS Langley (CV-1) is commissioned as the first United States Navy aircraft carrier.
1933 – Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler ordered the creation of Dachau Concentration Camp as Chief of Police of Munich and appointed Theodor Eicke as the camp commandant.
1948 – With a Musicians Union ban lifted, the first telecasts of classical music in the United States, under Eugene Ormandy and Arturo Toscanini, are given on CBS and NBC.
1951 – Jimmie Vaughan, American guitarist (The Fabulous Thunderbirds) was born.
1952 – The United States Senate ratifies a peace treaty with Japan.
1957 – Spike Lee, American actor, director, producer, and screenwriter was born.
1965 – President Lyndon B Johnson informs Governor Wallace the Alabama Governor that he will call up the Alabama National Guard to supervise and ensure the safety of a planned civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery after the last march which had been shown on Television with local police and state troopers using Billy clubs and tear gas on the marchers
1969 – John Lennon of the Beatles marries Yoko Ono a Japanese avant-garde artist and musician.
1972 – The Troubles: A Provisional IRA car bomb kills seven and injures 148 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It was the first of many car bomb attacks by the group.
1976 – Patricia Hearst, was convicted of taking part in a San Francisco bank robbery conducted by those who originally kidnapped her the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA).
1987 – The Food and Drug Administration approves the anti-AIDS drug, AZT.
1993 – The Troubles: A Provisional IRA bomb kills two children in Warrington, England. It leads to mass protests in both Britain and Ireland.
1995 – A sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway kills 13 and wounds 1,300 persons.
2000 – Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, a former Black Panther once known as H. Rap Brown, is captured after murdering Georgia sheriff’s deputy Ricky Kinchen and critically wounding Deputy Aldranon English.
2003 – 2003 invasion of Iraq: In the early hours of the morning, the United States and three other countries (the UK, Australia and Poland) begin military operations in Iraq.
2004 – Following the release of photographs published in worldwide news media of inmate Satar Jabar standing on a box with wires connected to his body and Lynndie England and Charles Graner posing with prisoners ordered to form human pyramid. The U.S. military charged seven soldiers of the 372nd Military Police Company with dereliction of duty, maltreatment, aggravated assault and battery of inmates at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.