1939 – In Washington, D.C., US President Franklin D. Roosevelt lays the cornerstone of the Jefferson Memorial.

1940 - A wall is built around the Warsaw Ghetto.

1941 – Holocaust: SS chief Heinrich Himmler orders the arrest and deportation to concentration camps of all homosexuals in Germany, with the exception of certain top Nazi officials.

1942 – World War II: The Naval Battle of Guadalcanal ends in a Allied victory.

1943 – Holocaust: German SS leader Heinrich Himmler orders that Gypsies were to be put "on the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps".

1945 – Venezuela joins the UN.

1948 – Louis Stephen St. Laurent succeeds William Lyon Mackenzie King as Prime Minister of Canada.

1949 – Nathuram Godse and Narayan Apte are executed for assassinating Mahatma Gandhi.

1953 - The sugar spreader is patented in West Germany.

1955 - The Liberal Democratic Party of Japan is founded. It ends up governing Japan continuously until 1993.

1960 - Basketball: An NBA record is set when Elgin Baylor of the New York Knicks scored 71 points in a single game.

1960 - A train crash in Pardubice, Czechoslovakia (now-Czech Republic) kills 110 people.

1966 - The Gemini 12 space probe splashed into the Atlantic Ocean, at the end of the Gemini program.

1966 - A Boeing 727 carrying Pan Am Flight 708 crashed near Berlin, killing all the 3 people on board.

1969 – Vietnam War: In Washington, D.C., 250,000-500,000 protesters staged a peaceful demonstration against the war.

1971 - Intel released the world's first commercial single-chip microprocessor, the 4004.

1976 - Rene Levesque became Premier of Quebec.

1978 - A chartered Douglas DC-8 airplane crashed near Colombo, Sri Lanka.

1983 – Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus is founded.

1985 – The Anglo-Irish Agreement is signed by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Irish Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald.

1987 - Continental Airlines Flight 1713, a Douglas-9-14 jetliner, crashed in a snowstorm at Stapleton International Airport, Denver, Colorado, killing 28 people, with 54 surviving.

1987 - In Brasov, Romania, workers rebel against the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu.

1988 – An independent State of Palestine is proclaimed by the Palestinian National Council.

1988 - The first Fairtrade label, Max Havelaar, is launched in the Netherlands.

1990 - A new republican form of government is created in Bulgaria.

1990 - Space Shuttle Atlantis launched with Flight STS-38.

1990 – Producers admit that Milli Vanilli, who won the 1990 "Best New Artist" Grammy Award, did not sing on their album.

2000 - A chartered Antonov An-24 crashed after take-off from Luanda, Angola, killing over 40 people.

2000 - In India, the new state of Jharkhand is created, out of the southern part of the state of Bihar.

2002 – Hu Jintao became general secretary of the Communist Party of China.

2003 – In Istanbul, two synagogues are bombed, killing 25 people.

2005 - Boeing officially launched the stretched Boeing 747-8.

2006 - Al Jazeera English news channel launched worldwide.

2007 – Tropical Cyclone Sidr hits Bangladesh, killing around 5000 people. It also caused a large amount of destruction to the Sundarbans mangrove forest.

2012 - Xi Jinping is announced as the next general secretary of the Communist Party of China, expected to lead China until 2022.

2017 - The military took over in Zimbabwe as President Robert Mugabe is placed under house arrest.

2017 - It is announced that a postal survey in Australia resulted in 61.6% of participating voters supporting same-sex marriage.

2017 - The Scottish Government is allowed to introduce a minimum price for alcohol after a ruling following a long-running court case. This would make Scotland the first country in the world to introduce this policy.

2017 - Leonardo da Vinci's painting "Salvator Mundi" sells for 450 million United States dollars at auction in New York City, smashing the previous record for a work of art in such a sale.

2017 - Argentine submarine "ARA San Juan" was lost off the coast of southern Argentina, with 44 people on board.

2018 - In the United Kingdom, several government ministers resign over Prime Minister Theresa May's proposed Brexit deal, including Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab and Work and Pensions Secretary Esther McVey.