| On this date in: |
| 1766 | Britain repealed the Stamp Act. |
| 1922 | Mohandas K. Gandhi was sentenced to prison in India for civil disobedience. |
| 1925 | A tornado with a base nearly a mile wide tore a destructive path 219 miles from southeastern Missouri across Illinois and into southwestern Indiana. With 695 killed, it is the deadliest tornado in U.S. history. |
| 1931 | Schick Inc. marketed the first electric razor. |
| 1940 | Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini held a meeting at the Brenner Pass during which the Italian dictator agreed to join in Germany's war against France and Britain. |
| 1959 | President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Hawaii statehood bill. |
| 1962 | France and Algerian rebels agreed to a truce. |
| 1965 | Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov went on the first spacewalk. |
| 1974 | Most of the Arab oil-producing nations ended their embargo against the United States. |
| 2000 | Taiwan ended more than a half century of Nationalist Party rule by electing opposition leader Chen Shui-bian president. |
| 2002 | A 13-year-old girl died two days after being hit in the head by a hockey puck during an NHL game in Columbus, Ohio. |
| 2005 | Doctors in Florida, acting on orders of a state judge, removed Terri Schiavo's feeding tube. (The brain-damaged woman died 13 days later.) |
| 2008 | Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama confronted America's racial divide with a speech in Philadelphia. It was prompted by incindiary racial remarks made by Obama's African-American pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. |
| 2009 | British actress Natasha Richardson, 45, died at a New York hospital two days after suffering a head injury while skiing in Canada. |
