1532 – Lady Anne Boleyn was made Marquess of Pembroke by her fiancé, King Henry VIII of England.

1715 – At the age of five, Louis XV became king of France in succession to his great-grandfather, King Louis XIV.

1774 – Massachusetts Bay colonists rose up in the bloodless Powder Alarm, the removal of gunpowder from a magazine by British soldiers under orders from General Thomas Gage, royal governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay.

1878 – Emma Nutt became the world’s first female telephone operator when she was recruited by Alexander Graham Bell to the Boston Telephone Dispatch Company.

1897 – The Tremont Street Subway in Boston opened.  It was the first underground rapid transit system in North America.

1914 – St. Petersburg, Russia, changed its name to Petrograd.  

1914 – The last known passenger pigeon, a female named Martha, died in captivity in the Cincinnati Zoo.

1934 – The first Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer animated cartoon, The Discontented Canary, was released to movie theatres.

1939 – Adolf Hitler signed an order to begin the systematic euthanasia of mentally ill and disabled people.

1941 – The Nazis executed 2,500 Jews by shooting in Ostroh, Ukraine.

1952 – The Old Man and the Sea, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Ernest Hemingway, was first published.

1954 – “Rear Window”, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring James Stewart and Grace Kelly, was released.

1969 – A coup in Libya brought Muammar Gaddafi to power.

1970 – Palestinian guerrillas attacked the motorcade of King Hussein of Jordan in a failed assassination attempt.

1974 – The SR-71 Blackbird set (and holds) the record for flying from New York to London in the time of one hour, 54 minutes and 56.4 seconds at a speed of 1,435.587 miles per hour.

1975 – The last episode of Gunsmoke aired on tv.

1979 – The American space probe Pioneer 11 became the first spacecraft to visit Saturn when it passed the planet at a distance of 13,000 mi.

1982 – The United States Air Force Space Command was founded.

1983 – Cold War: Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down by a Soviet Union jet fighter when the commercial aircraft entered Soviet airspace, and killed all 269 on board, including Congressman Lawrence McDonald.

1985 – A joint American–French expedition located the wreckage of the RMS Titanic.

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