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History Today
- 1478: Thomas More, English politician
- 1700: Philippe Buache, French cartographer
- 1812: Charles Dickens, English novelist
- 1870: Alfred Adler, Austrian psychoanalyst
- 1885: Sinclair Lewis, US novelist
- 1906: Pu Yi, last Emperor of China from 1908-1912 under the name of Xuantong
- 1937: Peter Jay, British writer and broadcaster
- 1779: William Boyce, English organist and composer
- 1873: Sheridan Le Fanu, Irish writer
- 1894: Adolphe Sax, Belgian inventor of the saxophone
- 1959: Daniel Malan, South African statesman
- 1960: Igor Vasilevich Kuchatov, Russian nuclear physicist
- 1990: Jimmy Van Heusen, US composer
- 1994: Witold Lutoslawski, Polish composer and conductor
- 1301: Edward Caernarvon (later King Edward II) became the first Prince of Wales.
- 1792: Austria and Prussia formed an alliance against France.
- 1845: The Portland Vase, a Roman cameo glass vase dating to the 1st century BC, was smashed by a drunken visitor to the British Museum.
- 1863: HMS Orpheus was wrecked off the New Zealand coast, with the loss of 185 lives.
- 1947: The main group of the Dead Sea Scrolls, dating to about 150 BC-AD 68, was found in caves on the W side of the Jordan River.
- 1965: US aircraft bombed North Vietnam, following attacks on US areas in South Vietnam; the attack lead to the regular US bombing of North Vietnam.
- 1971: A referendum in Switzerland approved the introduction of female suffrage
- 1974: Grenada became a fully independent state within the Commonwealth
- 1990: The Central Committee of Communist Party in USSR voted to end the Party's monopoly on political power.
- 1991: British prime minister John Major and his senior cabinet ministers escaped an apparent assassination attempt when the IRA fired three mortar shells at 10 Downing Street from a parked van.
- 1995: Prime Minister Major, answering MPs' questions in the British House of Commons, called Labour Party leader Tony Blair a 'dimwit'. Blair was seeking clarification on Major's statement that before joining the single currency, he would require 'other criteria' than those outlined in the Maastricht treaty. Major responded, 'Frankly, only a dimwit would ask me that'
- 1995: A Turkish pilot was forced to eject from his crashing F-16 fighter plane after being pursued by two Greek Mirage F1 jets over the Aegean Sea. The incident threatened to aggravate the already tense relations between Greece and Turkey.
- 1996: 189 were feared dead as a Boeing 757 crashed in the Bermuda Triangle.
- 1997: The IRA declared that it was highly unlikely to announce a new cease-fire in advance of the British general election.
- 1997: Swiss banks were ordered to hand over records of deposits made in New York City during World War II. New York officials suspected that some of the assets deposited by Jews in the Nazi era might have been channelled to New York
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