Events
- 1584 - Sir Walter Raleigh is granted a patent to exploit Virginia.
- 1634 - The first settlers arrive in Maryland.
- 1655 - Protestants take control of Maryland at the Battle of the Severn.
- 1865 - American Civil War: In Virginia, Confederate forces capture Fort Stedman from the Union in a bloody battle.
- 1894 - Coxey's Army, the first significant American protest march, departs Massillon, Ohio for Washington, D.C.
- 1911 - In New York City the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire kills 146 garment workers.
- 1931 - The Scottsboro Boys are arrested in Alabama and charged with rape.
- 1947 - An explosion in a coalmine in Centralia, Illinois kills 111.
- 1955 - United States Customs seizes copies of Allen Ginsberg's poem "Howl" as obscene.
- 1965 - Civil rights activists led by Martin Luther King Jr. successfully complete their 4-day 50-mile march from Selma to the capitol in Montgomery.
- 1979 - The first fully functional Space Shuttle orbiter, Columbia, is delivered to the John F. Kennedy Space Center to be prepared for its first launch.
- 1990 - In the Bronx, New York City, a fire at an illegal social club called "Happy Land" kills 87 people.
- 1996 - An 81-day-long standoff between the anti-government group Montana Freemen and law enforcement near Jordan, Montana, begins.
- 2006 - The Capitol Hill massacre occurs: a gunman kills six people before taking his own life at a party in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood; it is one of the largest crime scenes the city has ever had.