John Wycliffe, Bible scholar and translator, died. (1384)
Wearing masks at balls was forbidden in Boston. (1809)
Abraham Mills’ commission declared Abner Doubleday invented baseball. (1853)
A dinner party was held inside a life-size model of an Iguanodon, ornithopod dinosaur, created by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins and Sir Richard Owen in south London. (1853)
US banks stopped payments in gold. (1861)
Author Rudyard Kipling was born. (1865)
Filipino nationalist José Rizal was executed by firing squad in Manila by the Spanish. (1896)
Electric arc lamp set fire to Iroquois theater in Chicago leaving 602 dead in one of the deadliest blazes in American history. (1903)
Abraham Mills’ commission declared Abner Doubleday invented baseball. (1907)
-37°F in Lewisburg, West Virginia set a state record. (1917)
-32°F in Mountain City, Tennessee set a state record. (1917)
Creation of the USSR was formally proclaimed in Moscow from the Bolshoi Theatre. (1922)
The Bolshevik government exiled Christian leaders Sergius Bulgakov and Nicholas Berdyaevis among one hundred and sixty prominent intellectuals. (1922)
Astronomer Edwin Hubble formally announced the existence of other galactic systems at meeting of the American Astronomical Society. (1924)
The silent film Ben Hur, based on Lew Wallace’s novel of the time of Christ, opened at the George M. Cohan Theater in New York City and received rave reviews. (1925)
International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, founded by evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, was incorporated in Los Angeles, California. (1927)
-50°F in Bloomfield, Vermont set a state record. (1933)
WW2: Corrie Ten Boom was released from a Nazi Concentration Camp because of a clerical error. She and her family had been sent there for hiding Jews. (1944)
-48°F in Mazama and Winthrop, Washington set a state record. (1968)
Vietnam War: US President Nixon halted bombing of North Vietnam and announced peace talks. (1972)
First picture of a comet from space was taken. (1973)
Vatican recognized Israel. (1993)
The lowest ever United Kingdom temperature of -27.2°C was recorded at Altnaharra in the Scottish Highlands. (1995)
An Islamic militant shot and killed three U.S. Christian missionaries working at a Baptist-run hospital in Yemen. (2002)
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