Today in History, 9/9

1087: William the Conqueror dies. In his later years, he had gotten pretty hefty and, when his horse bucked, the pommel of his saddle was driven up into his gut causing massive abdominal bleeding. After his death, his body was stripped of its valuables and left naked on the floor while his servants wisely got the hell out of Dodge. At the funeral, he was so fat and his body had been left to swell up for so long that it exploded as people tried to stuff him into his tomb. He was the last person to have successfully conquered England.
1543: At the age of nine months, Mary Stuart is crowned Queen of Scots in the town of Stirling.
1739: Stono Rebellion, the largest slave uprising in Britain's mainland North American colonies prior to the American Revolution, erupts near Charleston, South Carolina.
1754: William Bligh, captain of the HMS Bounty, is born.1776: The Continental Congress officially names their new union of sovereign states the United States.
1791: Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States, is named for President George Washington.
1828: Leo Tolstoy is born.
1839: John Herschel takes the first glass plate photograph.1850: California is admitted as the thirty-first U.S. state.
1850: The Compromise of 1850 strips Texas of a third of its claimed territory (now parts of Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Wyoming) in return for the U.S. federal government assuming $10 million of Texas's pre-annexation debt.
1887: Alf Landon is born. He was given a good shellacking by FDR in the 1936 presidential election. He only won 2 of the 48 states - Vermont and Maine.1919: Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder is born. Here he is torpedoing his career below the waterline:

1923: Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey, founds the Republican People's Party (CHP).1926: Cliff Robertson is born. He played The Big Kahuna in the original movie version of Gidget, but he's been in tons of stuff.
1926: The U.S. National Broadcasting Company formed.
1941: Otis Redding is born.

1947: First actual case of a computer bug being found: a moth lodges in a relay of a Harvard Mark II computer at Harvard University.
1952: Angela Cartwright is born. She played Penny Robinson in the original Lost in Space.1952: Dave Stewart, of the Eurythmics, is born.

1952: Jeffrey Combs is born. He's made a good living playing a succession of creepy guys, from Dr. Herbert West in the Re-Animator movies to the insane FBI agent Milton Dammers in The Frighteners to the affably evil Vorta clone Weyoun on Deep Space Nine. Interestingly, he was on the short list to play Commander Riker on Star Trek: TNG, but lost the part to Johnathan Frakes.

1955: John Kricfalusi, creator of Ren & Stimpy, is born.

1956: Elvis Presley appears on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time.

1965: The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development is established.
1966: Adam Sandler is born.
1969: Rachel Hunter, Kiwi supermodel, is born.
1971: The four-day Attica Prison riot begins, which eventually results in 39 dead, most killed by state troopers retaking the prison.

Today in History elements mostly cribbed from The History Channel, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Jewish World Review, The Writer's Almanac and anything else I can dig up.