1587 – Queen Elizabeth I of England signs death warrant for Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots
1810 – US Population: 7,239,881
1867 – Bricklayers start working 8-hour days
1892 – Mrs. William Astor invites 400 guests to a grand ball at her mansion thus beginning use of “400” to describe socially elite
1898 – First auto insurance policy in US issued, by Travelers Insurance Co
1914 – Pennsylvania State Board of Motion Picture censors appointed
1923 – Fascists Voluntary Militia forms in Italy under Benito Mussolini
1937 – Stapleton, Staten Island becomes a customs-free port
1950 – USSR demands condemnation of Emperor Hirohito for war crimes
1951 – First X-ray moving picture process demonstrated
1959 – Swiss men vote against voting rights for women
1959 – Texas Instruments requests patent of Integrated Circuit.
1965 – Martin Luther King Jr. and 700 demonstrators arrested in Selma Ala
1968 – Saigon police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan executes a Viet Cong officer with a pistol shot to head
1972 – First scientific hand-held calculator (HP-35) introduced ($395)
1977 – Heavy blizzard in New England claims 100 lives
1979 – Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returns to Iran after 15 years in exile
2003 – Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrates during reentry, killing all seven astronauts aboard.
Birthdays
1462 – Johannes Trithemius, German cryptographer (d. 1516)
1801 – Thomas Cole, landscape painter (Hudson River School)
1931 – Boris Yeltsin, Ural Mts USSR, president of Russia
Deaths
1328 – Charles IV, the Handsome, King of France (1322-28), dies
1650 – Rene Descartes, philosopher “I think therefore I am”, stops thinking
1851 – Mary Shelley, novelist (Frankenstein), dies at 53
1944 – Piet Mondrian, abstract painter (Composition in Blue), dies at 71
1991 – James G MacDonald, cartoon voice (Mickey Mouse), dies at 84
2003 – Michael P. Anderson – David Brown – Kalpana Chawla –
Laurel Clark – Rick D. Husband -Willie McCool – Ilan Ramon. the crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia
2013 – Ed Koch, American congressman and New York Mayor, dies from heart failure at 88