On this date...

Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback

In 1620, 103 Mayflower pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock.

In 1719, First recorded display of Aurora Borealis (northern lights) in New England.

In 1775, William Sever writes from Watertown with encouraging news: The Massachusetts legislature has created quarantine measures for refugees suspected of smallpox.

In 1775, From his Cambridge headquarters, Washington writes to John Hancock, president of Congress. He reports that smallpox may indeed be spreading from Boston into his lines but assures Hancock that precautions are in place. He explains a quiet decision: The commissary has been issuing butter without authorization, and though Congress never approved it, Washington will not risk discontent by taking it away now.

In 1777, General George Washington begins marching 12,000 soldiers of his Continental Army from Whitemarsh to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, for the winter. As Washington’s men began crossing the Schuylkill River, they were surprised by a regiment of several thousand British troops led by General Charles Cornwallis.

In 1816, Indiana became the 19th state.

In 1844, First dental use of nitrous oxide in Hartford, Connecticut, by John Riggs on dentist Horace Wells

In 1862, The Union Army of the Potomac occupies Fredericksburg, Virginia, as General Ambrose Burnside continues to execute his plan to capture the Confederate capital at Richmond.

In 1872, Already appearing as a well-known figure of the Wild West in popular dime novels, Buffalo Bill Cody makes his first stage appearance on this day, in a Chicago-based production of The Scouts of the Prairie.

In 1872, Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback takes office in Louisiana as the first African American US Governor.

In 1902, The US signs a treaty with Cuba allowing for a 20 percent reduction of tariff rates on imported Cuban products.

In 1909, Colored moving pictures are demonstrated at Madison Square Garden in New York City.

In 1919, the citizens of Enterprise, Alabama, erected a monument to the boll weevil, the pest that devastated their fields but forced residents to end their dependence on cotton and to pursue mixed farming and manufacturing.

In 1928, Buenos Aires police thwart assassination attempt on President-elect Herbert Hoover - prevent anarchists from bombing his train.

In 1930, This day brought another ominous sign that the nation was sliding towards a prolonged and difficult economic slump, as New York’s branch of Bank of the United States announced that it had gone belly-up.

In 1934, After a 13-year struggle with the bottle, stockbroker Bill Wilson takes his last drink of the hard stuff. The following year, he would found Alcoholics Anonymous, the groundbreaking program that treated alcoholism not as a moral failing, but as a disease.

In 1941, Germany and Italy declare war on the US.

In 1941, A Japanese invasion fleet attacked Wake Island, which was defended by 439 US marines, 75 sailors and 6 soldiers. The defenders sank 4 Japanese ships, damaged 8 and destroyed a submarine.

In 1961, The ferry carrier, USNS Core, arrives in Saigon with the first U.S. helicopter unit. This contingent included 33 Vertol H-21C Shawnee helicopters and 400 air and ground crewmen to operate and maintain them. Their assignment was to airlift South Vietnamese Army troops into combat.

In 1963, kidnappers release Frank Sinatra, Jr., after abducting him in Lake Tahoe, California, three days earlier.

In 1967, The Oscar-winning film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, a lesson in racial tolerance, premiered in New York City; it starred Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy (in his last movie), and Sidney Poitier.

In 1972, Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt became the last humans to walk on the Moon.

In 1978, Cash and jewels worth more than $5 million were stolen from an air cargo building at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City on this day in 1978. Only one person was ever convicted in connection with the Lufthansa heist, and almost none of the stolen money was recovered.

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed legislation creating a $1.6 billion environmental ‘Superfund’ to pay for cleaning up hazardous chemical spills and toxic waste dumps.

In 1981, American boxer Muhammad Ali fought his last professional bout, losing to Trevor Berbick in a decision.

In 1998, The Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives recommended three articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton, to which would be added a fourth article the following day, for actions taken in connection with his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

In 2001, In the first criminal indictment stemming from Sept. 11, a US grand jury in Virginia charged Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, with conspiring to murder thousands in the suicide hijackings.

In 2002, A congressional report found that intelligence agencies before Sept. 11, 2001, were poorly organized, poorly equipped and slow to pursue clues that might have prevented that day's terrorist attacks.

In 2008, financier Bernard Madoff is arrested at his New York City apartment and charged with masterminding a long-running Ponzi scheme later estimated to involve around $65 billion, making it one of the biggest investment frauds in Wall Street history.

In 2020, the Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit backed by President Donald Trump to overturn Joe Biden’s election victory, ending an attempt to get legal issues that were rejected by state and federal judges before the nation’s highest court.

In 2022, Karen Bass sworn in as first female mayor of Los Angeles by Vice President Kamala Harris, declares a Homelessness state of emergency in the city