On Feb. 4, 1746, Thaddeus Kosciuszko, a Polish army officer who was one of the few foreign-born heroes to fight on the colonists' side in the Revolutionary War, was born in Poland's Polesie province.
In 1783 Britain declared a formal cessation of hostilities with its former colonies, the United States of America.
In 1789 electors unanimously chose George Washington to be the first president of the United States.
In 1861 delegates from six Southern states met in Montgomery, Ala., to form the Confederate States of America.
In 1921 feminist author Betty Friedan was born in Peoria.
In 1941 the United Service Organizations (USO) came into existence.
In 1945 President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin began a wartime conference at Yalta.
In 1948 the island nation of Ceylon--now Sri Lanka--became an independent dominion within the British Commonwealth.
In 1974 newspaper heir Patricia Hearst was kidnapped in Berkeley, Calif., by the Symbionese Liberation Army.
In 1976 more than 22,000 people died when a severe earthquake struck Guatemala and Honduras.
In 1977 two Chicago elevated trains crashed at Lake Street and Wabash Avenue, killing 11 people and injuring 183.
In 1995 a standoff between the United States and China escalated into a trade war, with each country ordering stiff tariffs against the other.
In 1999 Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant, was shot and killed in front of his Bronx home by four plainclothes New York City police officers.
In 2003 lawmakers formally dissolved Yugoslavia and replaced it with a loose union of its remaining two republics, Serbia and Montenegro.
In 2004 the Massachusetts high court declared that gays were entitled to nothing less than marriage.