1597 – A group of early Japanese Christians are killed by the new government of Japan for being seen as a threat to Japanese society.
1778 – South Carolina becomes the second state to ratify the Articles of Confederation.
1852 – The Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia, one of the largest and oldest museums in the world, opens to the public.
1900 – The United States and the United Kingdom sign a treaty for the Panama Canal.
1917 – The Congress of the United States passes the Immigration Act of 1917 over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto. Also known as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, it forbade immigration from nearly all of south and southeast Asia.
1919 – Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D.W. Griffith launch United Artists.
1937 – President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposes a plan to enlarge the Supreme Court of the United States.
1958 – A hydrogen bomb known as the Tybee Bomb is lost by the US Air Force off the coast of Savannah, Georgia, never to be recovered.
1963 – The European Court of Justice’s ruling in Van Gend en Loos v Nederlandse Administratie der Belastingen establishes the principle of direct effect, one of the most important, if not the most important, decisions in the development of European Union law.
1971 – Astronauts land on the moon in the Apollo 14 mission.
1994 – Byron De La Beckwith is convicted of the 1963 murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers.
1997 – The so-called Big Three banks in Switzerland announce the creation of a $71 million fund to aid Holocaust survivors and their families.
2000 – Russian forces massacre at least 60 civilians in the Novye Aldi suburb of Grozny, Chechnya.
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