1769, Frontiersman Daniel Boone begins to explore present-day Kentucky.
1776, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia proposes to the Continental Congress a resolution calling for a Declaration Of Independence.
1909, Actress Jessica Tandy (The Birds, The World According To Garp, Cocoon, Driving Miss Daisy,Nobody’s Fool; former wife of Hume Cronyn) is born. She dies in 1994.
1929, the sovereign state of Vatican City came into existence as copies of the Lateran Treaty were exchanged in Rome.
1917, Actor-singer Dean Martin (Rio Bravo, Ocean’s Eleven, Robin And The 7 Hoods, The Sons Of Katie Elder, Airport, The Cannonball Run) is born. He dies in 1995 at age 78.
1946, The U.S. Supreme Court bans discrimination in interstate travel.
1955, the TV game show The $64,000 Question premiered.
1965, an 1879 Connecticut law banning the use of contraceptives was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.
1970, The Who performs Tommy at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House.
1972, The musical Grease opens on Broadway.
1975, the Sony Corporation unveiled its new Betamax consumer home videotape recorder, better known as the VCR. It sold for $995.
1976, The NBC Nightly News, with John Chancellor and David Brinkley, first aired.
1979, The U.S. Internal Revenue Service charges Chuck Berry with tax evasion on the same day he plays for President Carter at the White House.
1982, Elvis Presley‘s Graceland mansion is opened to the public.
1993, The groundbreaking ceremony for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame And Museum takes place in Cleveland, Ohio. Pete Townshend, Billy Joel, and Chuck Berry attend.
1996, the Clinton administration acknowledged it had obtained the FBI files of House Speaker Newt Gingrich‘s press secretary, former Bush Chief Of Staff James A. Baker III, and other appointees from Republican administrations, calling it “an innocent bureaucratic mistake.”
1998, in a crime that shocked the nation, James Byrd, Jr., a 49-year-old black man, was chained to a pickup truck and dragged to his death in Jasper, Texas, by three white men.
1999, the FBI put terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden on the list of Ten Most Wanted fugitives.
2002, Michael Skakel was convicted of beating his neighbor Martha Moxley to death in 1975. The two were 15 years old at the time.