Today:
1540 – Pope Paul III formally approved the Society of Jesus, better known as the Jesuits, through the papal bull Regimini militantis ecclesiae.
1777 – Lancaster, Pennsylvania, briefly served as the capital of the United States for a single day after the Continental Congress fled Philadelphia ahead of advancing British forces.
1822 – Jean-François Champollion announced that he had deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics using the Rosetta Stone, a breakthrough that opened the way to understanding ancient Egyptian writing.
1905 – Albert Einstein’s paper establishing the relationship between mass and energy was published. The work introduced the principle that would later become famously expressed as E = mc².
1922 – King Constantine I of Greece abdicated the throne following a military revolt triggered by Greece’s defeat in the Greco-Turkish War.
1937 – The first Santa Claus training school opened in Albion, New York. Founded by Charles W. Howard, the school taught aspiring Santas everything from proper dress and makeup to interacting with children.
1940 – Germany, Italy and Japan signed the Tripartite Pact in Berlin, formally creating the military alliance commonly known as the Axis Powers during World War II.
1964 – The Warren Commission released its report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing Kennedy.
1998 – Google was officially incorporated as a privately held company by Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The company would grow from a university research project into one of the world’s largest technology companies.
2008 – Chinese astronaut Zhai Zhigang performed China’s first spacewalk during the Shenzhou 7 mission, making China the third nation to independently conduct an extravehicular activity.