| On this date in: |
| 1562 |
French Protestants were recognized under the Edict of St. Germain. |
| 1706 |
Statesman and inventor Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston. |
| 1806 |
Thomas Jefferson’s daughter, Martha, gave birth to James Madison Randolph, the first child born in the White House. |
| 1893 |
Hawaii’s monarchy was overthrown. |
| 1893 |
Rutherford B. Hayes, the 19th president of the United States, died in Fremont, Ohio, at age 70. |
| 1899 |
Gangster Al Capone was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. |
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| AP Photo |
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| 1945 |
Soviet and Polish forces liberated Warsaw during World War II. |
| 1945 |
Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, credited with saving tens of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust, was taken into Soviet custody in Budapest, Hungary. (His fate has never been determined.) |
| 1946 |
The United Nations Security Council held its first meeting. |
| 1977 |
Convicted murderer Gary Gilmore was shot by a firing squad at Utah State Prison in the first U.S. execution in a decade. |
| 1994 |
A magnitude 6.7 earthquake struck Southern California, killing at least 61 people and causing $20 billion worth of damage. |
| 1995 |
A magnitude 7.2 earthquake devastated the city of Kobe, Japan; more than 6,000 people were killed. |
| 1997 |
A court in Ireland granted the first divorce in the Roman Catholic country’s history. |
| 1998 |
President Bill Clinton became the first U.S. president to testify as a defendant in a criminal or civil suit when he answered questions from lawyers for Paula Jones, who had accused Clinton of sexual harassment. |
| 2001 |
Faced with an electricity crisis, California used rolling blackouts to cut off power to hundreds of thousands of people. |
| 2008 |
Chess master Bobby Fischer died at age 64. |
