Today:
1845: Florida was admitted to the Union as the 27th U.S. state.
1847: Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the first practical telephone, was born in Edinburgh, Scotland.
1875: The first organized indoor game of ice hockey was played at the Victoria Skating Rink in Montreal, Canada.
1887: Anne Sullivan began teaching 6-year-old Helen Keller, who was blind and deaf, at her home in Alabama.
1913: Thousands of women marched in the Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington, D.C., one day before the inauguration of Woodrow Wilson.
1923: The first issue of Time magazine was published, featuring Joseph G. Cannon on the cover.
1931: President Herbert Hoover signed a congressional act making The Star-Spangled Banner the official national anthem of the United States.
1938: Oil was discovered in commercial quantities in Saudi Arabia at the Dammam No. 7 well.
1969: NASA launched Apollo 9 to conduct the first manned flight test of the lunar module in Earth orbit.
1991: An amateur video captured the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers, an event that later sparked widespread civil unrest.