1537 – Pope Paul III banned the enslavement of Indians.

1774 – The Quartering Act, which required American colonists to allow British soldiers into their houses, was reenacted.

1793 – Maximillian Robespierre initiated the “Reign of Terror”. It was an effort to purge those suspected of treason against the French Republic.

1818 – The British army defeated the Maratha alliance in Bombay, India.

1835 – P.T. Barnum launched his first traveling show. The main attraction was Joice Heth. Heth was reputed to be the 161-year-old nurse of George Washington.

1886 – Grover Cleveland became the second U.S. president to get married while in office. He was the first to have a wedding in the White House.

1896 – Guglieimo Marconi’s radio telegraphy device was patented in Great Britain.

1897 – Mark Twain, at age 61, was quoted by the New York Journal as saying “the report of my death was an exaggeration.” He was responding to the rumors that he had died.

1910 – Charles Stewart Roll became the first person to fly non-stop and double cross the English Channel.

1924 – All American Indians were granted U.S. citizenship by the U.S. Congress.

1928 – Nationalist Chiang Kai-shek captured Peking, China.

1946 – Italians voted by referendum to form a republic instead of a monarchy.

1953 – Elizabeth was crowned queen of England at Westminster Abbey.

1954 – U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy charged that there were communists working in the CIA and atomic weapons plants.

1957 – Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was interviewed by CBS-TV.

1966 – Surveyor 1, the U.S. space probe, landed on the moon and started sending photographs back to Earth of the Moon’s surface. It was the first soft landing on the Moon.

1969 – Australian aircraft carrier Melbourne sliced the destroyer USS Frank E. Evans in half off the shore of South Vietnam.

1979 – Pope John Paul II arrived in his native Poland on the first visit by a pope to a Communist country.

1999 – In South Africa, the African National Congress (ANC) won a major victory. ANC leader Thabo Mbeki was to succeed Nelson Mandela as the nation’s president.

2003 – In Seville, Spain, a chest containing the supposed remains of Christopher Columbus were exhumed for DNA tests to determine whether the bones were really those of the explorer. The tests were aimed at determining if Colombus was currently buried in Spain’s Seville Cathedral or in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic.