2019
More than 1.5 million students participated in climate change protests around the world as part of Fridays for Future, a movement started by Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg.
2011
Antigovernment protests were held in several cities across Syria, considered the beginning of the county’s civil war.
2003
Hu Jintao succeeded Jiang Zemin as the president of China.
1990
The Congress of People’s Deputies of the U.S.S.R. elected Mikhail Gorbachev to the newly created post of president of the Soviet Union.
1972
The Godfather, an epic drama about organized crime, premiered to universal acclaim; the Academy Award-winning film was directed by Francis Ford Coppola and starred Al Pacino and Marlon Brando.
1964
Following a highly publicized affair, American actress Elizabeth Taylor wed British actor Richard Burton in Montreal; they divorced in 1974 and briefly remarried (1975–76).
1917
During the first phase of the Russian Revolution, Tsar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate, thus ending the rule of the Romanov dynasty.
1875
Pope Pius IX appointed John McCloskey the first American cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church.
1781
American revolutionaries won a strategic victory over the British at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse in North Carolina.
1767
Military hero and seventh U.S. president (1829–37) Andrew Jackson, who was the first president to come from west of the Appalachians and the first to gain office by a direct appeal to the mass of voters, was born.
1614
Franciscus Sylvius, whose studies helped shift medical emphasis from mystical speculation to a rational application of the laws of physics, was born in Hanau, Germany.
