| On this date in: |
| 1810 | Emperor Napoleon of France was married by proxy to Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria. |
| 1888 | A blizzard struck the northeastern United States, resulting in some 400 deaths. |
| 1941 | President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the Lend-Lease Bill, providing war supplies to countries fighting the Axis. |
| 1942 | As Japanese forces continued to advance in the Pacific during World War II, Gen. Douglas MacArthur left the Philippines for Australia. He subsequently vowed: "I shall return." |
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| AP Photo |
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| 1970 | The album "Deja Vu" by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young was released. |
| 1977 | More than 130 hostages held in Washington, D.C., by Hanafi Muslims were freed. |
| 1978 | Palestinian guerrillas went on a rampage on the Tel Aviv-Haifa highway, killing 34 Israelis. |
| 1985 | Mikhail S. Gorbachev was chosen to succeed the late Soviet President Konstantin Chernenko.
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| 1990 | The Lithuanian parliament voted to break away from the Soviet Union and restore its independence.
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| 1993 | Janet Reno was unanimously confirmed by the Senate to be the nation's first female attorney general. |
| 1993 | North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. |
| 1997 | Rock musician Paul McCartney of the Beatles was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. |
| 2002 | Two columns of light soared skyward from ground zero in New York as a temporary memorial to the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks. |
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| AP Photo/Mike Derer |
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| 2005 | A man being escorted to court for trial in Atlanta took a gun from a sheriff's deputy and went on a deadly rampage, killing four people, including a judge. (Brian Nichols was later found guilty and sentenced to life in prison without parole). |
| 2006 | Former Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic was found dead of a heart attack in his cell during his war crimes trial in The Hague. |
