1774: The British closed the port of Boston to all commerce.
1799: In Palestine, Napoleon captured Jaffa and his men massacred more than 2,000 Albanian prisoners.
1848: In Hawaii, the Great Mahele was signed.
1849: The Austrian Reichstag was dissolved.
1850: U.S. Senator Daniel Webster endorsed the Compromise of 1850 as a method of preserving the Union.
1854: Charles Miller received a patent for the sewing machine.
1876: Alexander Graham Bell received a patent (U.S. Patent No. 174,465) for his telephone.
1901: It was announced that blacks had been found enslaved in parts of South Carolina.
1904: The Japanese bombed the Russian town of Vladivostok.
1904: In Springfield, OH, a mob broke into a jail and shot a black man accused of murder.
1906: Finland granted women the right to vote.
1908: Cincinnati's mayor, Mark Breith announced before the city council that, "Women are not physically fit to operate automobiles."
1911: Willis Farnworth patented the coin-operated locker.
1911: In the wake of the Mexican Revolution, the U.S. sent 20,000 troops to the border of Mexico.
1918: Finland signed an alliance treaty with Germany.
1925: The Soviet Red Army occupied Outer Mongolia.
1927: A Texas law that banned Negroes from voting was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.
1933: CBS radio debuted "Marie The Little French Princess." It was the first daytime radio serial.
1933: The board game Monopoly was invented.
1935: Malcolm Campbell set an auto speed record of 276.8 mph in Florida.
1936: Hitler sent German troops into the Rhineland in violation of the Locarno Pact and the Treaty of Versailles.
1942: Japanese troops landed on New Guinea.
1945: During World War II, U.S. forces crossed the Rhine River at Remagen, Germany.
1947: John L. Lewis declared that only a totalitarian regime could prevent strikes.
1951: U.N. forces in Korea under General Matthew Ridgeway launched Operation Ripper against the Chinese.
1954: Russia appeared for the first time in ice-hockey competition. Russia defeated Canada 7-2 to win the world ice-hockey title in Stockholm, Sweden.
1955: "Peter Pan" was presented as a television special for the first time.
1955: Baseball commissioner Ford Frick said that he was in favor of legalizing the spitball.
1955: Phyllis Diller made her debut at the Purple Onion in San Francisco, CA.
1959: Melvin C. Garlow became the first pilot to fly over a million miles in jet airplanes.
1965: State troopers and a sheriff's posse broke up a march by civil rights demonstrators in Selma, AL.
1968: The Battle of Saigon came to an end.
1971: A thousand U.S. planes bombed Cambodia and Laos.
1975: The U.S. Senate revised the filibuster rule. The new rule allowed 60 senators to limit debate instead of the previous two-thirds.
1981: Anti-government guerrillas in Colombia executed the kidnapped American Bible translator Chester Allen Bitterman. The guerrillas accused Bitterman of being a CIA agent.
1983: TNN (The Nashville Network) began broadcasting.
1985: "Commonwealth" magazine ceased publication after five decades.
1985: The first AIDS antibody test, an ELISA-type test, was released.
1987: Mike Tyson became the youngest heavyweight titleholder when he beat James Smith in a decision during a 12-round fight in Las Vegas, NV.
1989: Poland accused the Soviet Union of a World War II massacre in Katyn.
1994: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that parodies that poke fun at an original work can be considered "fair use" that does not require permission from the copyright holder.
1994: In Moldova, a referendum was rejected by 90% of voters to form a union with Rumania.
1999: In El Salvador, Francisco Flores Pérez of the ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena) was elected president.
2002: A federal judge awarded Anna Nicole Smith more than $88 million in damages. The ruling was the latest in a legal battle over the estate of Smith's late husband, J. Howard Marshall II.
2003: Scientists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center announced that they had transferred 6.7 gigabytes of uncompressed data from Sunnvale, CA, to Amsterdam, Netherlands, in 58 seconds. The data was sent via fiber-optic cables and traveled 6,800 miles.
2009: NASA's Kepler Mission, a space photometer for searching for extrasolar planets in the Milky Way galaxy, was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida.
