1521 – Pope Leo X excommunicates Martin Luther in the papal bull Decet Romanum Pontificem.
1749 – Benning Wentworth issues the first of the New Hampshire Grants, leading to the establishment of Vermont.
1848 – Joseph Jenkins Roberts is sworn in as the first president of the independent African Liberia.
1861 – Delaware votes not to secede from the United States.
1925 – Benito Mussolini announces he is taking dictatorial powers over Italy.
1933 – Minnie D. Craig becomes the first female elected as Speaker of the North Dakota House of Representatives, the first female to hold a Speaker position anywhere in the United States.
1938 – The March of Dimes is established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
1946 – Popular Canadian American jockey George Woolf dies in a freak accident during a race; the annual George Woolf Memorial Jockey Award is created to honor him.
1953 – Frances P. Bolton and her son, Oliver from Ohio, become the first mother and son to serve simultaneously in the U.S. Congress.
1956 – A fire damages the top part of the Eiffel Tower.
1977 – Apple Computer is incorporated.
1997 – China announces it will spend US $27.7 billion to fight erosion and pollution in the Yangtze and Yellow River valleys.
2009 – The first block of the blockchain of the decentralized payment system Bitcoin, called the Genesis block, was established by the creator of the system, Satoshi Nakamoto.
2015 – Boko Haram militants raze the entire town of Baga in north-east Nigeria, with as many as 2,000 people having been killed.
