• 1325 - Alfonso IV becomes King of Portugal.
• 1558 - France takes Calais, the last continental possession of England.
• 1598 - Boris Godunov becomes Tsar of Russia.
• 1608 - Fire destroys Jamestown, Virginia.
• 1610 - Galileo Galilei observes the four largest moons of Jupiter for the first time. He named them and in turn the four are called the Galilean moons.
• 1782 - The first American commercial bank, the Bank of North America, opens.
• 1785 - Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard and American John Jeffries travel from Dover, England, to Calais, France, in a gas balloon.
• 1797 - The modern Italian flag is first used.
• 1835 - The HMS Beagle anchors off the Chonos Archipelago.
• 1894 - W.K. Dickson receives a patent for motion picture film.
• 1904 - The distress signal "CQD" is established only to be replaced two years later by "SOS".
• 1922 - Dáil Éireann ratifies the Anglo-Irish Treaty by a 64-57 vote.
• 1927 - First transatlantic telephone call - New York City to London.
• 1931 - Guy Menzies flies the first solo non-stop trans-Tasman flight (from Australia to New Zealand) in 11 hours and 45 minutes, crash-landing on New Zealand's west coast.
• 1935 - Benito Mussolini and French Foreign Minister Pierre Laval sign the Franco–Italian Agreement.
• 1942 - World War II: The siege of the Bataan Peninsula begins.
• 1945 - World War II: British General Bernard Montgomery holds a press conference in which he claims credit for victory in the Battle of the Bulge.
• 1950 - A fire at the Mercy Hospital in Davenport, Iowa, kills 41 people.
• 1953 - President Harry Truman announces that the United States has developed the hydrogen bomb.
• 1954 - Georgetown-IBM experiment, the first public demonstration of a machine translation system, is held in New York at the head office of IBM.
• 1959 - The United States recognizes the new Cuban government of Fidel Castro.
• 1972 - Iberia Airlines Caravelle 6-R crashes into Mont San Jose on approach to Ibiza Airport killing all 104 on board.
• 1973 - Mark Essex fatally shoots 10 people and wounds 13 others at Howard Johnson’s Hotel in New Orleans, Louisiana before being shot to death by police officers.
• 1979 - Phnom Penh falls to the advancing Vietnamese troops, driving out Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
• 1980 - President Jimmy Carter authorizes legislation giving $1.5 billion in loans to bail out the Chrysler Corporation.
• 1984 - Brunei becomes the sixth member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
• 1990 - The interior of the Leaning Tower of Pisa is closed to the public due to safety concerns.
• 1991 - Beginning of the operation Desert Storm, during the Gulf War.
• 1993 - The Fourth Republic of Ghana is inaugurated with Jerry Rawlings as President.
• 1999 - The impeachment of President Bill Clinton begins.

Births