1469, Italian political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli was born.
1649, the first American law to regulate the practice of medicine passed in New York.
1802, Washington, D.C., was incorporated as a city. The mayor was appointed by the president, and the council elected by property owners.
1898, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was born.
1921, West Virginia imposed the first state sales tax.
1933,The United States Mint was under the direction of a woman, Nellie Ross, for the first time.
1933 James Brown was born. He died in 2006.
1936, Joe DiMaggio played his first major league game, getting three hits in the New York Yankees’ 14-5 win over St. Louis.
1937, Margaret Mitchell won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel Gone With The Wind.
1948, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that covenants banning the sale of real estate to blacks or members of other racial groups were legally unenforceable.
1948 Playwright Tennessee Williams wins the Pulitzer Prize for his play A Streetcar Named Desire.
1960, The play The Fantasticks opened at the Sullivan Playhouse in New York City. It would become the longest-running off-Broadway play ever.
1971, National Public Radio, a national noncommercial radio network financed by the Corporation For Public Broadcasting, began broadcasting.
1975 Elton John performs “Philadelphia Freedom” and “Bennie And The Jets” on the TV show Soul Train.
1979, the victorious Conservative Party chose Margaret Thatcher to become Britain’s first female prime minister, a position she held for the next 12 years.
1986, Horse racing legend Bill Shoemaker became the oldest jockey to win the Kentucky Derby. “The Shoe” was atop Ferdinand for the win. It had been 32 years since Shoemaker’s first Kentucky Derby victory in 1955.
1986, In NASA’s first post-Challenger launch, an unmanned Delta rocket lost power in its main engine shortly after liftoff, forcing safety officers to destroy it by remote control.
1988, The White House acknowledged that first lady Nancy Reagan had used astrological advice to help schedule her husband’s activities, after a report about unflattering revelations in an impending memoir by former chief of staff Donald Regan.