On this date...

In 1776, Washington remained at Cambridge, studying the movements of the lingering British fleet. From Braintree, Josiah Quincy sends close, journal-like reporting: red ensigns, blue flags, and pendants shift repeatedly from Vice Admiral Molyneux Shuldham’s flagship. “I wish it was in my Power to construe it,” Quincy confesses, unable to read the admiral’s intent.

In 1776, from Gloucester, Winthrop Sargent reports that 70 ships passed Cape Ann at sundown. Washington weighs these precise observations carefully.

In 1804, President Thomas Jefferson attended a public party at the Senate and led a diverse crowd in consuming an enormous loaf of bread dubbed the mammoth loaf. The giant bread was baked to go with the remnants of an enormous block of cheese.

In 1804, Congress ordered the removal of Indians east of Mississippi to Louisiana

In 1812, in opposition to the redrawing of districts to favour incumbents in an upcoming election, the Boston Gazette published a satiric cartoon that graphically transformed the districts into a fabulous animal, “The Gerry-mander”; the term gerrymander thus entered the American lexicon.

In 1820, future Mormon church leader Joseph Smith had his "First Vision" in a wooded area of New York, according to Mormon scholars.

In 1830, The Book of Mormon was published in Palmyra, New York.

In 1863, voters in West Virginia approved the gradual emancipation of slaves.

In 1872, Thomas J. Martin, of Alabama, received a U.S. patent for a pipe and valve fire extinguisher system.

In 1885, the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Co. of Rochester, N.Y., manufactured the first commercial motion picture film

In 1917, the Seattle Metropolitans became the first American ice hockey team to win the Stanley Cup, defeating the Montreal Canadiens 9-1 to win the championship series, three games to one.

In 1920, This Side of Paradise was published, immediately launching 23-year-old F. Scott Fitzgerald to fame and fortune.

In 1945, the island of Iwo Jima was declared secure by the United States military after more than a month of intense fighting. More than 6,000 Marines died during the engagement to take the island, as did almost all of the 21,000 Japanese soldiers defending it.

In 1950, during a radio broadcast dealing with a Senate investigation into communists in the U.S. Department of State, news leaked that Senator Joseph McCarthy had charged Professor Owen Lattimore with being a top spy for the Soviet Union. Lattimore soon became a central figure in the Red Scare hysteria created by McCarthy’s reckless charges and accusations.

In 1951, the United States Air Force flag was officially adopted by President Harry S. Truman.

In 1953, Dr. Jonas Salk announced that he had successfully tested a vaccine to prevent polio, and clinical trials began the following year.

In 1979, the historic peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, agreed to by Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat and based on the Camp David Accords mediated by U.S. President Jimmy Carter in September 1978, was signed.

In 1992, Heavyweight boxing champion Mike Tyson was sentenced to six years in prison following a rape conviction in Indianapolis, Indiana.

In 1997, Police discovered the bodies of 39 members of Heaven's Gate, an American religious group founded on a belief in unidentified flying objects; they had died by suicide in the belief that a spaceship was arriving to take them to a better place.

In 1999, Dr. Jack Kevorkian was convicted of second-degree murder for giving a lethal injection to an ailing man whose death was shown on "60 Minutes."

In 2018, a US soldier received the world's first penis and scrotum transplant at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland

In 2021, Dominion Voting Systems filed a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, saying the cable news giant falsely claimed that the voting company rigged the 2020 election.

In 2024, Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge collapsed after being struck by a container ship, killing six maintenance workers on the bridge.