| | 41 - After a night of negotiation, Claudius is accepted as Roman Emperor by the Senate. |
| | 844 - Gregory IV begins and ends his reign as Catholic Pope. |
| | 1327 - Edward III becomes King of England. |
| | 1494 - Alfonso II becomes King of Naples. |
| | 1533 - Henry VIII of England secretly marries his second wife Anne Boleyn. |
| | 1554 - Founding of São Paulo city, Brazil. |
| | 1579 - Treaty of Utrecht signed, marks beginning of Dutch Republic. |
| | 1755 - Moscow University established on Tatiana Day. |
| | 1787 - American Daniel Shays leads rebellion to seize Federal arsenal to protest debtor prisons. |
| | 1791 - The British Parliament passes the Constitutional Act of 1791 and splits the old province of Quebec into Upper and Lower Canada. |
| | 1792 - The London Corresponding Society is founded. |
| | 1858 - The Wedding March by Felix Mendelssohn becomes a popular wedding recessional after it is played on this day at the marriage of Queen Victoria's daughter, Victoria, and Friedrich of Prussia. |
| | 1879 - The Bulgarian National Bank is founded. |
| | 1881 - Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell form the Oriental Telephone Company. |
| | 1890 - The United Mine Workers of America is founded. |
| | 1890 - Nellie Bly completes her round-the-world journey in 72 days. |
| | 1915 - Alexander Graham Bell inaugurates U.S. transcontinental telephone service. |
| | 1917 - The Danish West Indies is sold to the United States for $25 million. |
| | 1918 - Russia declared a republic of Soviets. |
| | 1919 - The League of Nations is founded. |
| | 1924 - The 1924 Winter Olympics open in Chamonix, France (in the French Alps), inaugurating the Winter Olympic Games. |
| | 1941 - Pope Pius XII elevates the Apostolic Vicariate of the Hawaiian Islands to the dignity of a diocese. It becomes the Roman Catholic Diocese of Honolulu. |
| | 1942 - Thailand declares war on the United States and United Kingdom. |
| | 1946 - The United Mine Workers rejoins the American Federation of Labor. |
| | 1949 - At the Hollywood Athletic Club the first Emmy Awards are presented. |
| | 1949 - The first Israeli election -- David Ben-Gurion becomes Prime Minister. |
| | 1955 - Russia ends state of war with Germany. |
| | 1959 - Pope John XXIII proclaims Second Vatican Council. |
| | 1960 - The National Association of Broadcasters reacts to the Payola scandal by threatening fines for any disc jockeys who accepted money for playing particular records. |
| | 1961 - In Washington, D.C. John F. Kennedy delivers the first live presidential television news conference. |
| | 1969 - US-North Vietnamese peace talks begin in Paris. |
| | 1971 - Charles Manson and three female "family members" are found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment. |
| | 1971 - Idi Amin leads a coup deposing Milton Obote and becomes Uganda's president. |
| | 1971 - Himachal Pradesh becomes the 18th Indian state. |
| | 1981 - Mao's widow Jiang Qing sentenced to death. |
| | 1986 - The National Resistance Movement topple the government of Tito Okello in Uganda. |
| | 1990 - The Burns' Day storm hits Northwestern Europe. |
| | 1990 - Honduras becomes a member of the Berne Convention copyright treaty. |
| | 1993 - Mir Amir Kansi kills two employees outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. |
| | 1995 - The Norwegian Rocket Incident: Russia almost launches a nuclear attack after Black Brant XII, a Norwegian research rocket, is mistaken for a US Trident missile by the Olenegorsk early-warning radar station. |
| | 1998 - During a historic visit to Cuba Pope John Paul II demands the release of political prisoners and political reforms while condemning US attempts to isolate the country. |
| | 1998 - Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) suicide attack on Sri Lanka's Temple of the Tooth, killing 8 people injuring 25 others. |
| | 1999 - A 6.0 Richter scale earthquake hits western Colombia killing at least 1,000. |
| | 2002 - Wikipedia switches to the new version of its software ("Phase II") aka Magnus Manske Day. |
| | 2004 - Opportunity (MER-B) lands on surface of Mars. |
| | 2005 - A stampede during a pilgrimage in India kills at least 258. |
| | 2006 - Three independent observing campaigns announce the discovery of OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb through gravitational microlensing, the first cool rocky/icy extrasolar planet around a main-sequence star. |
| | 2006 - The Council of Europe passes a draft resolution that emphatically condemns the atrocities and human rights violations of totalitarian communist regimes. |