1547 – Edward VI of England is crowned King of England at Westminster Abbey.
1792 – The Postal Service Act, establishing the United States Post Office Department, is signed by President George Washington.
1901 – The legislature of Hawaii Territory convenes for the first time.
1909 – Publication of the Futurist Manifesto in the French journal Le Figaro.
1931 – The Congress of the United States approves the construction of the San Francisco – Oakland Bay Bridge by the state of California.
1933 – The Congress of the United States proposes the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution that will end Prohibition in the United States.
1933 – Adolf Hitler secretly meets with German industrialists to arrange for financing of the Nazi Party’s upcoming election campaign.
1943 – American movie studio executives agree to allow the Office of War Information to censor movies.
1943 – The Saturday Evening Post publishes the first of Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms in support of United States President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address theme of Four Freedoms.
1954 – Patty Hearst, American actress was born.
1959 – The Avro Arrow program to design and manufacture supersonic jet fighters in Canada is cancelled by the Diefenbaker government amid much political debate.
Kurt Donald Cobain (February 20, 1967 – c. April 5, 1994) was an American musician and artist.
1971 – The United States Emergency Broadcast System is accidentally activated in an erroneous national alert.
1987 – Unabomber: In Salt Lake City, a bomb explodes in a computer store.
1989 – An IRA bomb destroys a section of a British Army barracks in Ternhill, England
2003 – During a Great White concert in West Warwick, Rhode Island, a pyrotechnics display sets the Station nightclub ablaze, killing 100 and injuring over 200 others.
2005 – Spain becomes the first country to vote in a referendum on ratification of the proposed Constitution of the European Union, passing it by a substantial margin, but on a low turnout.
2005 – Hunter S. Thompson, American journalist and author (b. 1937) died.
2007 – An American appeals court has upheld an anti-terrorism provision that states that the Guantánamo Bay inmates will not be able to challenge their detention in the U.S. courts. The provision is a key element in a law for prosecuting the terror suspects that President Bush passed through Congress in 2006. The appeal court has said that civilian courts cannot determine whether detainees are being held illegally. The ruling is likely to go to the Supreme Court, which had thrown out the government’s original plans for trying detainees before military commissions. The Court of Appeals upheld an act of the 109th Congress to remove the right of Guantánamo Bay detainees to challenge their detention in lower federal courts. The Military Commissions Act suspends the right to habeas corpus and bars anyone deemed an ‘enemy combatant’ access to the federal courts.