Source: HistoryNet.com
1035: King Canute of Norway dies.
1859: The first flying-trapeze circus act is performed by Jules Leotard at the Circus Napoleon.
1867: Mount Vesuvius erupts.
1903: The Lebaudy brothers of France set an air-travel distance record of 34 miles in a dirigible.
1923: Adolf Hitler is arrested for his attempted German coup.
1927: Canada is admitted to the League of Nations.
1944: U.S. fighters wipe out a Japanese convoy near Leyte, consisting of six destroyers, four transports and 8,000 troops.
1944: The German battleship Tirpitz is sunk in a Norwegian fjord.
1948: Hikedi Tojo, Japanese prime minister, and seven others are sentenced to hang by an international tribunal.
1960: The satellite Discoverer XVII is launched into orbit from California's Vandenberg AFB.
1968: The U.S. Supreme Court voids an Arkansas law banning the teaching of evolution in public schools.
1971: President Richard Nixon announces the withdrawal of about 45,000 U.S. troops from Vietnam by February.
1987: Boris Yeltsin is fired as head of Moscow's Communist Party for criticizing the slow pace of reform.
1990: Crown Prince Akihito is formally installed as Emperor Akihito of Japan.
1990: Sir Timothy John "Tim" Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist, publishes a formal proposal for the creation of the World Wide Web.
1996: A Saudi Arabian Airlines Boeing 747 collides with a Kazakh Illyushin II-76 cargo plane near New Delhi, killing 349. It is the deadliest mid-air collision to date (2013) and third-deadliest aircraft accident.
1997: Ramzi Yousef convicted of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
2003: Shanghai Transrapid sets a new world speed record (311 mph or 501 kph) for commercial railway systems.