| | 1463 - Poet François Villon is banned from Paris. |
| | 1477 - Battle of Nancy: Charles the Bold is killed and Burgundy becomes part of France. |
| | 1500 - Duke Ludovico Sforza conquers Milan. |
| | 1527 - Felix Manz, a leader of the Anabaptist congregation in Zürich, was executed by drowning. |
| | 1554 - A great fire occurs in Eindhoven, Netherlands. |
| | 1675 - Battle of Colmar: the French army beats Brandenburg. |
| | 1757 - Louis XV of France survives the assassination attempt by Robert–François Damiens, the last person to be executed in France with the traditional and gruesome form of death penalty used for regicides. |
| | 1759 - George Washington marries Martha Dandridge Custis. |
| | 1781 - American Revolutionary War: Richmond, Virginia, is burned by British naval forces led by Benedict Arnold. |
| | 1846 - The United States House of Representatives votes to stop sharing the Oregon Territory with the United Kingdom. |
| | 1854 - The San Francisco steamer sinks, killing 300 people. |
| | 1895 - Dreyfus Affair: French officer Alfred Dreyfus is stripped of his rank and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island. |
| | 1896 - An Austrian newspaper reports that Wilhelm Roentgen discovered a type of radiation later known as X-rays. |
| | 1900 - Irish leader John Edward Redmond calls for a revolt against British rule. |
| | 1909 - Colombia recognizes the independence of Panama. |
| | 1912 - Prague Party Conference. |
| | 1914 - Ford Motor Company announces an eight-hour workday and a minimum wage of $5 for a day's labor. |
| | 1919 - Free Committee for a German Workers Peace founded, which would become the Nazi party. |
| | 1925 - Nellie Tayloe Ross becomes the first female governor in the United States. |
| | 1933 - Construction of the Golden Gate Bridge begins in San Francisco Bay. |
| | 1940 - FM radio is demonstrated to the FCC for the first time. |
| | 1944 - The Daily Mail becomes the first transoceanic newspaper. |
| | 1945 - The Soviet Union recognizes the new pro-Soviet government of Poland. |
| | 1948 - Warner Brothers shows the first color newsreel (Tournament of Roses Parade and the Rose Bowl). |
| | 1957 - Major league baseball player Jackie Robinson retires. |
| | 1964 - Pope Paul VI meets the Greek patriarch Athenagoras I in Jerusalem: the first meeting of Catholic and Orthodox Christianity leaders since 1439. |
| | 1968 - Alexander Dubcek comes to power: "Prague Spring" begins in Czechoslovakia. |
| | 1970 - Soap opera: All My Children premieres. |
| | 1972 - President of the United States Richard Nixon orders the development of a space shuttle program. |
| | 1974 - An earthquake in Lima, Peru, kills six people, and damages hundreds of houses. |
| | 1975 - The Tasman Bridge in Tasmania, Australia, is struck by the bulk ore carrier Lake Illawarra, killing twelve people. |
| | 1976 - Cambodia is renamed Democratic Campuchea. |
| | 1984 - Richard Stallman starts developing GNU. |
| | 1993 - The oil tanker MV Braer runs aground on the coast of the Shetland Islands, spilling 84,700 tons of crude oil. |
| | 1993 - Washington state executes Westley Allan Dodd by hanging (the first legal hanging in America since 1965). |
| | 1996 - Hamas operative Yahya Ayyash is killed by an Israeli-planted booby-trapped cell phone. |
| | 1997 - Russian forces withdraw from Chechnya. |
| | 2000 - The first day of the 2000 Al Qaeda Summit. |
| | 2005 - Eris, the largest known dwarf planet in the solar system, was discovered by the team of Michael E. Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David L. Rabinowitz using images originally taken on October 21, 2003, at the Palomar Observatory. |
| | 2006 - Independence Air ceases operations. |