1765: Robert Fulton, inventor of the steamboat, is born.
1862: Abraham Lincoln approves General Ambrose Burnside's plan to capture the Confederate capital at Richmond, Virginia, leading to the Battle of Fredericksburg. It didn't work and the Union Army of the Potomac got a good shellacking.
1840: Claude Monet is born.
1889: Pioneering female journalist Nellie Bly (aka Elizabeth Cochrane) begins a successful attempt to travel around the world in less than 80 days. She completes the trip in seventy-two days.
1889: Jawaharlal Nehru, First Prime Minister of India, is born. The Nehru Jacket is named for him. I've always wanted a Nehru Jacket so I could become the hippie guru I was meant to be. 
1907: William Steig, author of Sylvester and the Magic Pebble and dozens of other children's books is born.1908: Joseph McCarthy is born.
1910: Aviator Eugene Ely performs the first take off from a ship in Hampton Roads, Virginia. He took off from a makeshift deck on the USS Birmingham in a Curtiss pusher.
1916: Sherwood Schwartz, creator of Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch, is born.1921: Brian Keith, from Hardcastle & McCormick, is born.
1922: The BBC begins radio service in the United Kingdom.
1927: McLean Stevenson, who played Lt. Col. Henry Blake on MASH, is born.
1929: Jimmy Piersall is born. He was a baseball player with some pretty serious bi-polar disorder issues and his life was chronicled in the not-very-historically-accurate movie Fear Strikes Out.
1940: In England, the city of Coventry is heavily bombed by German Luftwaffe bombers. Coventry Cathedral is almost completely destroyed.1947: P.J. O'Rourke is born.
1948: Charles, Prince of Wales is born.
1957: The Apalachin Meeting outside Binghamton, New York is raided by law enforcement, and many high level Mafia figures are arrested.1959: Paul McGann is born. He played the eighth Doctor in the thankfully aborted American version of Doctor Who.
1964: Patrick Warburton is born. He is most famous for playing David Puddy on Seinfeld, but he also provides the voice of the homicidal bodyguard Brock Samson on The Venture Bros.1972: The Dow Jones Industrial Average closes above 1,000 (1,003.16) for the first time.
1979: US President Jimmy Carter issues Executive order 12170, freezing all Iranian assets in the United States in response to the hostage crisis.
1990: After German reunification, the Federal Republic of Germany and the Republic of Poland sign a treaty confirming the Oder-Neisse line as the border between Germany and Poland.
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.
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