Today:
1702: The Daily Courant, England’s first national daily newspaper, begins publication in London.
1810: Napoleon Bonaparte marries Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria by proxy.
1851: Giuseppe Verdi’s opera Rigoletto premieres at the La Fenice theater in Venice.
1861: The Constitution of the Confederate States of America is formally adopted in Montgomery, Alabama.
1918: The first cases of the Spanish flu in the United States are reported at Fort Riley, Kansas.
1930: William Howard Taft becomes the first U.S. president to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
1941: President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Lend-Lease Act, providing military aid to Allied nations during World War II.
1985: Mikhail Gorbachev is elected as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
1993: Janet Reno is confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the first female Attorney General of the United States.
2011: A massive earthquake and tsunami strike Japan, leading to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.