1901 – Bob Marshall (pictured), author, government official, and one of the founders of The Wilderness Society, is born. Today he is considered largely responsible for the wilderness preservation movement in America.
1920 – The second Palmer Raid takes place, with 6,000 suspected communists and anarchists arrested and held without trial across several U.S. cities.
1949 – Luis Muñoz Marín becomes the first democratically elected governor of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. All previous holders of the office were appointed, first by the King of Spain, then by the President of the United States.
2004 – Spirit (pictured), one of a pair of Mars Exploration Rovers sent to survey the geology of Mars, makes a successful landing. Its twin, Opportunity rover would land on the opposite side of the planet three weeks later.
1893 – The Washington National Cathedral (pictured) is chartered by Congress. Construction would not begin until 1907, and would not end until 1990.
1910 – The Great White Fleet, a fleet of United States Navy battleships that completed a circumnavigation of the globe between 1907 and 1909, passes through the Suez Canal. It is the largest group of ships to pass through the canal up to that time.
1962 – NASA announces plans to build the C-5 rocket. Better known as the Saturn V, the rocket would serve as the launch vehicle for every Apollo Project mission, including those that landed on the Moon.
2003 – Illinois Governor George Ryan commutes the death sentences of 167 prisoners on Illinois' death row after it is discovered that Chicago Police Department detective Jon Burge elicited several confessions through the use of torture. The move effectively ends the use of the death penalty in the state.
1907 – Abraham Joshua Heschel, Warsaw-born American rabbi and one of the leading Jewish theologians and Jewish philosophers of the 20th century, is born.
1942 – As part of the mobilization for World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt reestablishes the National War Labor Board, an arbitration tribunal chartered with solving labor disputes in order to prevent work stoppages in areas critical to the war effort.
1991 – An act of Congress authorizes the use of military force to drive the military of Iraq out of Kuwait. The intervention would become known as the Gulf War.
1706 – Benjamin Franklin (pictured), who would become a leading author and printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, diplomat, and Founding Father of the United States, is born.
1899 – The United States takes possession of Wake Island in the Pacific Ocean.
1911 – Eugene B. Ely lands a fixed-wing aircraft on the deck of the USS Pennsylvania using a tailhook apparatus, the first successful landing of an aircraft on a ship (pictured).
1809 – Edgar Allan Poe, a poet and author best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, is born. Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre.
1981 – United States and Iranian officials sign an agreement to release 52 American hostages after 14 months of captivity, ending the Iran Hostage Crisis.
1835 – In the first assassination attempt against a President of the United States, Richard Lawrence attempts to shoot president Andrew Jackson, but fails and is subdued by a crowd, including several congressmen as well as Jackson himself.