This book of the law shall not depart from your mouth, but you shall meditate on it day and night, so that you may be careful to do according to all that is written in it; for then you will make your way prosperous, and then you will have success.

JOS 1:8

1130: Death of Pope Honorius II

1282; The IlKhan Abaqua travels from Baghdad to Hamadan

1476: French lay siege to Granson, Switzerland

1542: The fifth wife of England's King Henry the Eighth, Catherine Howard, was executed for adultery.

1542: Catherine Howard, 5th wife of Henry VIII, is beheaded

1566: Founding of St. Augustine, Florida

1570: End of the Massacre of Novgorod

1571: Death of Benvenuto Cellini, silversmith and sculptor

1580: Murder of Pommier, French peasant rebel leader

1590: Death of St. Katherine de'Ricci

1592: Death of Jacopo da Ponte, known as "Bassano," painter

1601: John Lancaster leads 1st East India Company voyage from London

1621: Bessie Harlow, Bessie Chalmers, Beatrice Mundie, Christiane Hamyltoun, Margaret Kent, and Marioun Chatto tried for witchcraft in Inverkiething, Scotland

1633: Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei arrived in Rome for trial before the Inquisition.

1635: The oldest public school in the United States, the Boston Public Latin School, was founded.

1689: British Parliament adopts the Bill of Rights.

1741: "The American Magazine," the first magazine in the United States was published in Philadelphia. It beat Benjamin Franklin's "General Magazine" off the presses by three days.

1795: The University of North Carolina became the first United States state university to open its doors to students.

1865: The Confederacy approves the recruitment of slaves as soldiers, as long as the approval of their owners is gained.

1866: Jesse James holds up his first bank. Another outlaw legend, Charles "Black Bart" Boles baffled Wells Fargo detectives during an eight year stint of stagecoach robberies.

1867: Johann Strauss' magnificent "Blue Danube Waltz" was played for the first time at a public concert in Vienna, Austria.

1875: Mrs. Edna Krause of Watertown, Wisconsin, gave birth to America's first quintuplets. Sadly, all five of the baby boys died within two weeks.

1914: The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, known as ASCAP, was founded in New York.

1920: The League of Nations recognized the perpetual neutrality of Switzerland.

1920: The National Negro Baseball League was organized.

1935: A jury in Flemington, New Jersey, found Bruno Richard Hauptmann guilty of first-degree murder in the kidnap-death of the infant son of Charles and Anne Lindbergh. Hauptmann was later executed.

1936: First social security checks are put in the mail.

1937: "Prince Valiant" comic strip appears; known for historical detail and fine detail drawing.

1939: Virginia Payne, already popular as the voice of "Ma Perkins", took on a new character in the soap opera, "The Carter's of Elm Street." The show was heard on NBC Radio.

1940: Earl 'Fatha' Hines and his Orchestra recorded the classic "Boogie Woogie On St. Louis Blues".

1945: During World War Two, the Soviets captured Budapest, Hungary, from the Germans.

1945: Allied planes began bombing the German city of Dresden.

1960: France exploded its first atomic bomb in the Sahara desert.

1949: A mob burns a radio station in Ecuador after the broadcast of H.G. Wells’ "War of the Worlds."

1950: Albania recognizes Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnamese government, becoming the sixth Eastern bloc country to do so.

1953: The Pope asks the U.S. to grant clemency to convicted spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.

1965: Sixteen-year-old Peggy Fleming won the ladies senior figure skating title at Lake Placid, New York. She was elected to the International Women's Sports Hall of Fame and the Olympic Hall of Fame.

1968: The U.S. sends 10,500 more combat troops to Vietnam. While the military is responsible for fighting a war, its civilian superiors determine how it will be fought.

1970: G.M. is reportedly redesigning automobiles to run on unleaded fuel.

1971: The Osmonds, a family singing group from Ogden, Utah, began a five-week stay at the top of the pop music charts with the hit, "One Bad Apple". The song, featured the voice of little Donny Osmond.

1972: Enemy attacks, in Vietnam, decline for the third day as the U.S. continues its intensive bombing strategy.

1974: Nobel Prize-winning author Alexander Solzhenitsyn was deported from the Soviet Union and stripped of Soviet citizenship.

1980: Opening ceremonies for the 13th Winter Olympics were held in Lake Placid, New York.

1984: Konstantin Chernenko succeeded the late Yuri Andropov as the Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee.

1984: Konstantin Chernenko was chosen to be general secretary of the Soviet Communist Party's Central Committee, succeeding the late Yuri Andropov.

1985: The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at a record high of 1,297.92 after it topped the 1,300 mark earlier in the trading session.

1987: Martin A. Siegel, a leading Wall Street investment banker turned in by stock speculator Ivan F. Boesky, plead guilty to conspiracy and tax evasion as part of the insider-trading scandal.

1988: The 15th winter Olympics opened in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. President Reagan and Mexican President Miguel de la Madrid met in the Mexican resort of Mazatlan.

1989: The judge in the Iran-Contra trial of Oliver North sent the jury home amid a continuing disagreement between the prosecution and defense over protecting classified materials.

1990: James "Buster" Douglas became the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world when his controversial knockout victory over Mike Tyson 2 days earlier was recognized by 2 holdout sanctioning bodies.

1990: The United States and its European allies forged an agreement with the Soviet Union and East Germany during an "open skies" conference in Ottawa on a two-stage formula to reunite Germany.

1990: Nelson Mandela received a hero's welcome when he returned to the black township of Soweto with a message of moderation and a pledge to end "the dark hell of apartheid."

1991: Hundreds of Iraqi civilians were killed when a pair of laser-guided US bombs destroyed an underground facility in Baghdad identified by US officials as a military installation, but which Iraqi officials said was a bomb shelter. 

1992: Donna Weinbrecht of the United States won the gold medal in women's freestyle skiing moguls at the Olympic games in Albertville, France.

1993: The government of Bosnia-Herzegovina began blocking the distribution of food in the capital of Sarajevo to protest ineffective international attempts to stop the war.

1994: At the Winter Olympics Games in Lillehammer, Norway, American Tommy Moe won the men's downhill, defeating local hero Kjetil Andre Aamodt by .004 of a second.

1995: A tribunal in the Netherlands indicted 21 Serbs for atrocities against Croats and Muslims interned in a Bosnian prison camp.

1996: In the continuing drama of man versus machine, world chess champion Garry Kasparov asked for a draw in his third game against the IBM supercomputer named "Deep Blue," leaving the six-game match in Philadelphia tied at one and a-half games each. 

1996: The rock musical "Rent," by Jonathan Larson, opened off-Broadway.

1997: "Discovery's" astronauts hauled the Hubble Space Telescope aboard the shuttle for a one-billion-mile tuneup to allow it to peer even deeper into the far reaches of the universe.

1997: On Wall Street, the Dow Jones industrial average broke through the 7,000 barrier for the first time, ending the day at 7022.44.

1998: Dr. David Satcher was sworn in as surgeon general during an Oval Office ceremony.

1998: The United Auto Workers reached a tentative contract agreement with Caterpillar Incorporated. (Union members rejected the agreement, which was revised and later ratified, ending a bitter, six-and-a-half-year dispute.)

1998: President Clinton forcefully sought to persuade Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to permit U.N. inspectors to search his country for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons but said Washington could not "walk away" if he did not. "I hope and I pray that he will permit qualified, honest, nonpolitical, technically competent inspectors to have access to those sites which have been forbidden," Clinton told reporters.

1998: The government agreed to delay stricter salt standards for foods labeled as "healthy" until 2000, instead of its previous deadline of November 1997. The USDA also said it might consider changing the definition of "healthy" for labels if food makers show that tougher salt restrictions are unrealistic.

1998: The World Health Organization announced that a potentially fatal parasitic disease transmitted by female sandflies had struck thousands of people in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Sudan. It said there had been a high mortality rate since the last months of 1997. Untredted the disease, visceral leishmaniasis, has a mortality rate of nearly 100%. Drugs essential for treating the disease were lacking in the region.

1999: A federal judge held American Airlines' pilots' union and two top board members in contempt and promised sizable fines against them, saying the union did not do enough to encourage pilots to return to work after a court order.

1999: In his lame weekly radio address, President Clinton said as many as 4,000 American troops would go to Kosovo as part of a NATO peacekeeping force if warring Serbs and ethnic Albanians reached a political settlement.

2000: Charles Schulz's final "Peanuts" strip ran in Sunday newspapers, the day after the cartoonist died in his sleep at his California home at age 77. 

2000: Tiger Woods saw his streak of six consecutive victories come to an end as he fell short to Phil Mickelson in the Buick Invitational.