History of the Day for:
- 1858: Minnesota became the 32nd state in the Union.
- 1888: Composer Irving Berlin was born.
- 1904: Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dali was born.
- 1910: Montana's Glacier National Park was established.
- 1947: B.F. Goodrich announced the development of a tubeless tire.
- 1949: Israel was admitted to the United Nations; Siam changed its name to Thailand.
- 1973: Charges against Daniel Ellsberg for his role in the "Pentagon Papers" case were dismissed by Judge William M. Byrne, who cited government misconduct.
- 1981: Bob Marley, Jamaican-born singer who popularized reggae with his group The Wailers, died of cancer in a Miami hospital.
- 1988: (Harold Adrian Russell) 'Kim' Philby, British intelligence officer, journalist and Russian spy, died. He was the "third man" who enabled fellow spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean to flee to Moscow in 1951.
- 1993: The Senate approved the so-called "motor voter" bill, designed to make voter registration easier.
- 1996: A ValuJet Airlines DC-9 jet with 110 people on board crashed in the swampy Everglades near Miami International Airport. There were no survivors.
- 1997: IBM's supercomputer Deep Blue made chess history by defeating Gary Kasparov, the first time a reigning world champion had been bested in a match by a machine.
- 1998: India conducts three underground nuclear tests in Pokhran, including a thermonuclear device.
- 2000: Effective date of Canada's first modern-day treaty - The Nisga'a Final Agreement.
- 2009: An American soldier in Iraq opened fire on a counseling center at Camp Liberty in Bagdhad, leaving 5 other US soldiers dead and 3 soldiers wounded.