Events
- 1852 - Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is published.
- 1899 - At Sing Sing prison, Martha M. Place is sentenced to become the first woman executed in an electric chair.
- 1914 - In New Haven, Connecticut, the first international figure skating championship takes place.
- 1922 - The USS Langley is commissioned as the first United States Navy aircraft carrier.
- 1933 - Giuseppe Zangara is executed in Florida's electric chair for fatally shooting Anton Cermak in an assassination attempt against Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
- 1942 - World War II: General Douglas MacArthur, at Terowie, South Australia, makes his famous speech regarding the fall of the Philippines, in which he says: "I came out of Bataan and I shall return".
- 1948 - With a Musicians Union ban lifted, the first telecasts of classical music in the United States, under Eugene Ormandy and Arturo Toscanini, are given on CBS and NBC.
- 1952 - The United States Senate ratifies a peace treaty with Japan.
- 1985 - Libby Riddles becomes the first woman to win the 1,135-mile Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.
- 1987 - The Food and Drug Administration approves anti-AIDS drug AZT.
- 1999 - Legoland California opens in Carlsbad, California.
- 2000 - Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, a former Black Panther once known as H. Rap Brown, is captured after a gun battle that leaves a Georgia sheriff's deputy dead.
- 2003 - 2003 invasion of Iraq: In the early hours of the morning, the United States and three other countries begin military operations in Iraq.