Source: HistoryNet.com
1801: The House of Representatives breaks an electoral college tie and chooses Thomas Jefferson over Aaron Burr.
1865: The South Carolina capital city, Columbia, is destroyed by fire as Major General William Tecumseh Sherman marches through.
1909: Apache chief Geronimo dies of pneumonia at age 80, while still in captivity at Fort Sill, Oklahoma.
1919: Germany signs an armistice giving up territory in Poland.
1925: The first issue of Harold Ross' magazine, The New Yorker, hits the stands, selling for 15 cents a copy.
1933: The League of Nations censures Japan in a worldwide broadcast.
1935: Thirty-one prisoners escape an Oklahoma prison after murdering a guard.
1938: The first colour television is demonstrated at the Dominion Theatre in London.
1955: Britain announces its ability to make hydrogen bombs.
1959: The United States launches its first weather station in space, Vanguard II.
1960: Martin Luther King Jr. is arrested in the Alabama bus boycott.
1963: Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev visits the Berlin Wall.
1975: Art by Cezanne, Gauguin, Renoir, and van Gogh, valued at $5 million, is stolen from the Municipal Museum in Milan.
1979: China begins a "pedagogical" war against Vietnam. It will last until March.
1985: Murray Haydon becomes the third person to receive an artificial heart.