Today:
1609: The Bermuda Islands become an English colony after the Sea Venture, an English ship headed for Virginia, is wrecked there.
1664: New Jersey is established as a British colony when King Charles II grants land between the Connecticut and Delaware Rivers to his brother James, the Duke of York.
1789: The United States Post Office is officially established under the new Constitution.
1894: Coca-Cola is sold in glass bottles for the first time in Vicksburg, Mississippi, by Joseph A. Biedenharn.
1912: Juliette Gordon Low officially registers the first troop of American Girl Guides, which later becomes the Girl Scouts of the USA, in Savannah, Georgia.
1930: Mahatma Gandhi begins the Salt March, a 240-mile trek to the sea to protest the British monopoly on salt in India.
1933: President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivers his first presidential address to the nation, marking the first of his famous fireside chats.
1938: German troops cross the border into Austria to perform the Anschluss, the forced annexation of the country into Nazi Germany.
1947: President Harry S. Truman outlines the Truman Doctrine in a speech to Congress, establishing the U.S. policy of containment toward Soviet expansion.
1999: Former Warsaw Pact members Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic officially join NATO.