306 – Maxentius was proclaimed Roman emperor.

312 – Constantine I defeated Maxentius and became the sole Roman emperor in the West.

1420 – Beijing was officially designated the capital of the Ming dynasty when the Forbidden City was completed.

1492 – Christopher Columbus landed in Cuba on his first voyage to the New World.  He surmised that it was Japan.

1520 – Ferdinand Magellan reached the Pacific Ocean.

1636 – The Massachusetts Bay Colony voted to establish a theological college, which later became Harvard University.

1664 – The Duke of York and Albany’s Maritime Regiment of Foot, later to be known as the Royal Marines, was established.

1726 – The novel Gulliver’s Travels was published.

1776 – American Revolutionary War: British troops attacked and captured Chatterton Hill from the Continental Army.

1835 – The United Tribes of New Zealand were established with the signature of the Declaration of Independence.

1864 – American Civil War: A Union attack on the Confederate capital of Richmond was repulsed.

1886 – US president Grover Cleveland dedicated the Statue of Liberty.

1919 – The U.S. Congress passed the Volstead Act over President Woodrow Wilson’s veto, which paved the way for Prohibition to begin the following January.

1922 – Italian fascists led by Benito Mussolini marched on Rome and took over the Italian government.

1942 – The Alaska Highway first connected Alaska to the North American railway network at Dawson Creek in Canada.

1948 – Paul Hermann Müller was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the insecticidal properties of DDT.

1956 – Elvis Presley’s song “Love Me Tender” became the No. 1 Billboard Pop Hit. He became the first artist to follow himself into the No. 1 position. The song “Don’t Be Cruel/Hound Dog” had been the No. 1 song for 11 weeks.

1962 – The Cuban Missile Crisis ended and Premier Nikita Khrushchev ordered the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba.

1963 – The Beach Boys’ “Be True To Your School” was released in the U.S.

1965 – Pope Paul VI promulgated Nostra aetate, by which the Roman Catholic Church officially recognized the legitimacy of non-Christian faiths.

1965 – The studio recording of “My World Is Empty Without You” was made by the Supremes.

1971 – Prospero became the only British satellite to be launched by a British rocket.

1972 – The United States Council for World Affairs announced that it was adopting The Who song, “Join Together,” as its official theme.

1978 – The movie KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park aired on NBC-TV as the NBC Movie of the Week.

1991 – The Metallica single “The Unforgiven” was released.

2009 – NASA successfully launched the Ares I-X mission, the only rocket launch for its short-lived Constellation program.

2009 – US President Barack Obama signed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

2014 – A rocket carrying NASA’s Cygnus CRS Orb-3 resupply mission to the International Space Station exploded seconds after taking off from the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Wallops Island, Virginia.

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