1701: The Collegiate School was founded in Killingworth, CT. The school moved to New Haven in 1745 and changed its name to Yale College.
1758: Author Noah Webster was born. He was a teacher and journalist whose name is associated with the word "dictionary."
1793: During the French Revolution, Queen Marie Antoinette was beheaded.
1829: The first modern hotel in America opened. The Tremont Hotel had 170 rooms that rented for $2 a day and included four meals.
1846: Ether, the painkiller, was used for the first time. The drug was invented by dentist William T. Morton.
1859: Abolitionist John Brown led a raid on Harper's Ferry, VA (now located in West Virginia).
1869: A hotel in Boston became the first in the U.S. to install indoor plumbing.
1898: Supreme Court Justice William Orville Douglas was born. He served for 36 years on the U.S. Supreme Court.
1916: Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in New York City, NY.
1923: Walt Disney contracted with M.J. Winkler to distribute the Alice Comedies. This event is recognized as the start of the Disney Company.
Disney movies, music and books
1928: Marvin Pipkin received a patent for the frosted electric light bulb.
1939: "Right To Happiness" debuted on the NBC-Blue network.
1939: "The Man Who Came to Dinner" opened on Broadway.
1941: The Nazis advanced to within 60 miles of Moscow. Romanians entered Odessa, USSR, and began exterminating 150,000 Jews.
1942: The ballet "Rodeo" premiered in New York City.
1943: Chicago's new subway system was officially opened with a ribbon cutting ceremony.
1944: "The Robe," by Lloyd Douglas, was published for the first time.
1945: "His Honor the Barber" debuted on NBC Radio.
1946: 10 Nazi war criminals were hanged after being condemned by the Nuremberg trials.
1955: Mrs. Jules Lederer replaced Ruth Crowley in newspapers using the name Ann Landers.
1962: U.S. President Kennedy was informed that there were missile bases in Cuba, beginning the Cuban missile crisis.
1964: China detonated its first atomic bomb becoming the world's fifth nuclear power.
1967: NATO headquarters opened in Brussels.
1970: Anwar Sadat was elected president of Egypt to succeed Gamal Abdel Nassar.
1973: Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were named winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. The Vietnamese official declined the award.
1987: Rescuers freed Jessica McClure from the abandoned well that she had fallen into in Midland, TX. The was trapped for 58 hours.
1989: U.S. President George H.W. Bush signed the Gramm-Rudman budget reduction law that ordered federal programs be cut by $16.1 billion.
1990: Comedian Steve Martin and his wife Victoria Tennant visited U.S. soldiers in Saudi Arabia.
1990: The play "Stand Up Tragedy" closed after only 13 performances.
1991: George Hennard crashed his truck into a Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen, TX and began a shooting rampage in which he killed 23 people before taking his own life.
1993: The U.N. Security Council approved the deployment of U.S. warships to enforce a blockade on Haiti to increase pressure on the controlling military leaders.
1994: German Chancellor Helmut Kohl was re-elected to a fourth term.
1995: The "Million Man March" took place in Washington, DC.
1997: Charles M. Schulz and his wife Jeannie announced that they would give $1 million toward the construction of a D-Day memorial to be placed in Virginia.
2000: It was announced that Chevron Corp. would be buying Texaco Inc. for $35 billion. The combined company was called Chevron Texaco Corp. and became the 4th largest oil company in the world.
2002: It was reported that North Korea had told the U.S. that it had a secret nuclear weapons program in violation of an 1994 agreement with the U.S.
2002: The Arthur Andersen accounting firm was sentenced to five years probation and fined $500,000 for obstructing a federeal investigation of the energy company Enron.
2008: The iTunes Music Store reached 200 billion television episodes sold.
