1741 – George Frideric Handel completes his oratorio Messiah.

1960 – The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is founded.

1994 – The rest of the Major League Baseball season is canceled because of a strike.

2000 – Microsoft releases Windows Me.

2015 – The first observation of gravitational waves is made, announced by the LIGO and Virgo collaborations on 11 February 2016.

1956 – The IBM 305 RAMAC is introduced, the first commercial computer to use disk storage.

 Red_Dragon wrote:

I stand corrected.

1933 – Leó Szilárd, waiting for a red light on Southampton Row in Bloomsbury, conceives the idea of the nuclear chain reaction.

1938 – Adolf Hitler demands autonomy and self-determination for the Germans of the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia.

1958 – Jack Kilby demonstrates the first working integrated circuit while working at Texas Instruments.

1959 – Bonanza, the first regularly scheduled TV program presented in color, is launched in the United States.

1962 – US President John F. Kennedy delivers his "We choose to go to the Moon" speech at Rice University.

1977 – South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko dies in police custody.

2013 – NASA confirms that its Voyager 1 probe has become the first manmade object to enter interstellar space.

2001 - September 11 attacks, a series of coordinated terrorist attacks that killed 2,977 people using four hijacked aircraft. Two aircraft crash into the World Trade Center in New York City, a third crashes into The Pentagon in Arlington County, Virginia, and a fourth into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

2008 – The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, described as the biggest scientific experiment in history, is powered up in Geneva, Switzerland.

1776 – The Continental Congress officially names its union of states the United States.

1791 – Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States, is named after President George Washington.

1839 – John Herschel takes the first glass plate photograph.

1940 – George Stibitz pioneers the first remote operation of a computer.

1947 – First case of a computer bug being found: A moth lodges in a relay of a Harvard Mark II computer at Harvard University.

1956 – Elvis Presley appears on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time.

2016 – The government of North Korea conducts its fifth and reportedly biggest nuclear test. World leaders condemn the act, with South Korea calling it "maniacal recklessness".

1504 – Michelangelo's David is unveiled in Piazza della Signoria in Florence.

1892 – The Pledge of Allegiance is first recited.

1966 – The landmark American science fiction television series Star Trek premieres with its first-aired episode, "The Man Trap".

1971 – In Washington, D.C., the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is inaugurated, with the opening feature being the premiere of Leonard Bernstein's Mass.

1974 – Watergate scandal: US President Gerald Ford signs the pardon of Richard Nixon for any crimes Nixon may have committed while in office.

1927 – The first fully electronic television system is achieved by Philo Farnsworth.

1936 – The last thylacine, a carnivorous marsupial, dies alone in its cage at the Hobart Zoo in Tasmania.

1979 – The Chrysler Corporation asks the United States government for US$1.5 billion to avoid bankruptcy.

2008 – The United States government takes control of the two largest mortgage financing companies in the US, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

1992 – A group of hunters at the Stampede trail near Healy, Alaska come across a male corpse in abandoned bus, later identified as Christopher McCandless.

1698 – In an effort to Westernize his nobility, Tsar Peter I of Russia imposes a tax on beards for all men except the clergy and peasantry.

1774 – First Continental Congress assembles in Philadelphia.

1793 – French Revolution: The French National Convention initiates the Reign of Terror.

1977 – Voyager Program: NASA launches the Voyager 1 spacecraft.

Geronimo!

1882 – The Pearl Street Station in New York City becomes the first power plant to supply electricity to paying customers.

1957 – American Civil Rights Movement: Little Rock Crisis: The governor of Arkansas calls out the National Guard to prevent African American students from enrolling in Little Rock Central High School, resulting in the lawsuit Cooper v. Aaron the following year.

1998 – Google is founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two PhD students at Stanford University.

1783 – American Revolutionary War: The war ends with the signing of the Treaty of Paris by the United States and the Kingdom of Great Britain.

1941 – The Holocaust: Karl Fritzsch, deputy camp commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, experiments with the use of Zyklon B in the gassing of Soviet POWs.

1944 – Holocaust: Diarist Anne Frank and her family are placed on the last transport train from the Westerbork transit camp to the Auschwitz concentration camp, arriving three days later.

1976 – Viking program: The American Viking 2 spacecraft lands at Utopia Planitia on Mars.

1981 – The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, an international bill of rights for women, is instituted by the United Nations.

2016 – The U.S. and China, together responsible for 40% of the world's carbon emissions, both formally ratify the Paris global climate agreement.

2017 – North Korea conducts its sixth and most powerful nuclear test.

 Red_Dragon wrote:
History merely rhymes.

1945 – World War II: The Japanese Instrument of Surrender is signed by Japan and the major warring powers aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay, thus marking the official end to the war.

2008 – Google launches its Google Chrome web browser.

1939 – Nazi Germany mounts a false flag attack on the Gleiwitz radio station, creating an excuse to attack Poland the following day, thus starting World War II in Europe.