1606 – Gunpowder Plot: Guy Fawkes is executed for plotting against Parliament and King James.
1747 – The first venereal diseases clinic opens at London Lock Hospital.
1801 – John Marshall is appointed the Chief Justice of the United States.
1849 – Corn Laws are abolished in the United Kingdom pursuant to legislation in 1846.
1865 – American Civil War: The United States Congress passes the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, abolishing slavery and submits it to the states for ratification.
1865 – American Civil War: Confederate General Robert E. Lee becomes general-in-chief.
1915 – World War I: Germany is the first to make large-scale use of poison gas in warfare in the Battle of Bolimów against Russia.
1917 – World War I: Germany announces that its U-boats will resume unrestricted submarine warfare after a two-year hiatus.
1919 – The Battle of George Square takes place in Glasgow, Scotland.
1930 – 3M begins marketing Scotch Tape.
1938 – Beatrix of the Netherlands was born.
1945 – US Army private Eddie Slovik is executed for desertion, the first such execution of an American soldier since the Civil War.
1945 – World War II: About 3,000 inmates from the Stutthof concentration camp are forcibly marched into the Baltic Sea at Palmnicken (now Yantarny, Russia) and executed.
1950 – President Harry S. Truman announces a program to develop the hydrogen bomb.
1961 – Project Mercury: Mercury-Redstone 2 – Ham the Chimp travels into outer space.
1968 – Viet Cong attack the United States embassy in Saigon, and other attacks, in the early morning hours, later grouped together as the Tet Offensive.
1971 – The Winter Soldier Investigation, organized by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War to publicize war crimes and atrocities by Americans and allies in Vietnam, begins in Detroit, Michigan.
1976 – Ernesto Miranda, American criminal, inspired the Miranda rights (b. 1941) died.
1995 – President Bill Clinton authorizes a $20 billion loan to Mexico to stabilize its economy.
2001 – In the Netherlands, a Scottish court convicts Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi and acquits another Libyan citizen for their part in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988.
2007 – Suspects are arrested in Birmingham in the UK, accused of plotting the kidnap, holding and eventual beheading of a serving Muslim British soldier in Iraq.
2010 – Avatar becomes the first film to gross over $2 billion worldwide.
2011 – A winter storm hits North America for the second time in the same month, causing $1.8 billion in damage across the United States and Canada and killing 24 people.
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