- 1868 The Shogunate is abolished in Japan
1900 The first modern submarine, designed and built by John Philip Holland, USS Holland, is acquired by the U.S. Navy
- 1921 Iowa imposes first state cigarette tax
- 1943 American helicopter designer Frank Piasecki, founder of Vertol, flies his first single-rotor craft [1]
Strangers in the Night
1966 Frank Sinatra records "Strangers in the Night" single for his album of the same name, later reaches #1 on the Billboard charts
- 1970 Beatles' "Let It Be" single goes #1 and stays #1 for 2 weeks
Luckenbach, Texas
1977 "Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)" single released by Waylon Jennings (Billboard Song of the Year, 1977)
- 1984 Challenger astronauts complete first in-space satellite repair
- 1986 A 1921 Canadian 50 cent coin is auctioned in New York for $22,000
- 1990 NY Lotto pays $35 million to two winners (numbers are 6-14-24-32-34-51)
Miss Saigon
1991 Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil's musical "Miss Saigon," based on Giacomo Puccini's "Madama Butterfly," and starring Jonathan Pryce and Lea Salonga opens at Broadway Theatre, NYC; runs for 4,092 performances, winning three Tony Awards
- 2013 Fossilized dinosaur eggs with embryos are discovered in China
Obama Meets Castro
2015 Barack Obama and Raúl Castro meet in Panama, the first meeting of US and Cuban heads of state since the Cuban Revolution
- 2023 Largest cosmic explosion ever recorded (AT2021lwx); fireball 100 times the size of the solar system with a brightness 2 trillion times the sun’s, thought to be a large gas cloud entering a supermassive black hole eight million light-years away [1]
