Today:
1777: San Jose, California, is founded as Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe by José Joaquín Moraga, becoming the first civilian settlement in Alta California.
1781: The crew of the British slave ship Zong murders over 50 enslaved Africans by dumping them into the sea to claim insurance money, an event that became known as the Zong massacre.
1864: American Civil War: The Sand Creek Massacre takes place in Colorado, where U.S. troops led by Colonel John Chivington kill an estimated 150 to 500 peaceful Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho people, mostly women and children, who were camped under a white flag of truce.
1877: American inventor Thomas Edison demonstrates his phonograph, a device for recording and reproducing sound, for the first time.
1890: The first Army-Navy football game is played at West Point, New York; the Navy team defeats Army 24-0.
1899: Football Club Barcelona (FC Barcelona) is founded by a group of Swiss, English, and Catalan footballers led by Joan Gamper.
1929: U.S. Admiral Richard E. Byrd and his crew become the first people to fly over the South Pole.
1947: The United Nations General Assembly passes Resolution 181, recommending the partition of Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states.
1963: U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson establishes the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of his predecessor, John F. Kennedy.
1972: Atari releases the arcade video game Pong, the first commercially successful video game, which helps launch the video game industry.