Today:
1. 1673: Lord Berkeley sold his half of New Jersey to the Quakers.
2. 1766: The British Parliament repealed the Stamp Act, a taxation measure imposed on the American colonies, which had caused widespread protests.
3. 1834: The Tolpuddle Martyrs, a group of six agricultural workers from Dorset, England, were sentenced to transportation to Australia for forming a trade union.
4. 1850: American Express was founded by Henry Wells and William Fargo in Buffalo, New York.
5. 1922: In India, Mahatma Gandhi was sentenced to six years in prison for civil disobedience during the Indian independence movement.
6. 1937: A gas explosion at the New London School in Texas killed over 295 students and teachers, one of the deadliest school disasters in U.S. history.
7. 1965: Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov became the first person to conduct a spacewalk, exiting the Voskhod 2 spacecraft for 12 minutes and 9 seconds.
8. 1968: The United States Congress passed the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which moved the observance of Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, Labor Day, and Columbus Day to specific Mondays, to create long weekends for federal employees.
9. 1990: Thieves stole 13 works of art worth over $500 million from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts, in what remains the largest art heist in history.
10. 2003: U.S. President George W. Bush announced the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, launching the invasion of Iraq.