Today:
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1386: Timur (Tamerlane) of Samarkand captures and sacks the Georgian capital of Tbilisi, taking King Bagrat V of Georgia captive and forcing him to convert to Islam.
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1620: The Pilgrims aboard the ship Mayflower, anchored off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, sign the Mayflower Compact, establishing a government for Plymouth Colony.
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1783: Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier and François Laurent d’Arlandes make the first untethered flight in a human-carrying hot air balloon, flying over Paris for 25 minutes.
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1789: North Carolina ratifies the U.S. Constitution, becoming the 12th state to be admitted to the Union.
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1877: American inventor Thomas Edison announces his invention of the phonograph, a machine capable of recording and playing sound.
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1916: During World War I, the HMHS Britannic, the sister ship of the Titanic, sinks in the Aegean Sea, likely after hitting a mine, killing 30 people.
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1922: Rebecca Latimer Felton of Georgia is sworn in, becoming the first woman to serve as a U.S. Senator (she served for only one day).
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1941: The fictional cartoon canary Tweety Bird, initially known as Orson, makes his debut in the Warner Bros. animated short A Tale of Two Kitties.
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1973: U.S. President Richard Nixon’s attorney, J. Fred Buzhardt, reveals the presence of an 18½-minute gap in one of the Watergate tape recordings.
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1980: The mystery of “Who shot J.R.?” on the popular American prime-time soap opera Dallas is resolved in an episode that became one of the most-watched broadcasts in television history.