EVENTS:
- 1258 – Baghdad falls to the Mongols, and the Abbasid Caliphate is destroyed.
- 1355 – The St Scholastica Day riot breaks out in Oxford, England, leaving 63 scholars and perhaps 30 locals dead in two days.
- 1923 – Texas Tech University is founded as Texas Technological College in Lubbock, Texas
- 1942 – The first gold record is presented to Glenn Miller for “Chattanooga Choo Choo“.
- 1964 – Melbourne–Voyager collision: The aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne collides with and sinks the destroyer HMAS Voyager off the south coast of New South Wales, Australia, killing 82.
- 1967 – The 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution is ratified.
- 1981 – A fire at the Las Vegas Hilton hotel–casino kills eight and injures 198.
- 1996 – The IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeats Garry Kasparov in chess for the first time.
- 2009 – The communications satellites Iridium 33 and Kosmos 2251 collide in orbit, destroying both.
- 2013 – Thirty-six people are killed and 39 others are injured in a stampede in Allahabad, India, during the Kumbh Mela festival.
- 2016 – South Korea decides to stop the operation of the Kaesong joint industrial complex with North Korea in response to the launch of Kwangmyŏngsŏng-4.
- 2018 – Nineteen people are killed and 66 injured when a Kowloon Motor Bus double decker on route 872 in Hong Kong overturns.
- 2021 – The traditional Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil is canceled for the first time because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
- 2021 – Texas’ worst energy infrastructure failure, the 2021 Texas power crisis, starts.
BIRTHS:
- 1890 – Boris Pasternak, Russian author, poet, and translator, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1960)
- 1897 – John Franklin Enders, American virologist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1985)
- 1902 – Walter Houser Brattain, Chinese-American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1987)
- 1903 – Matthias Sindelar, Austrian footballer and manager (d. 1939)
- 1910 – Dominique Pire, Belgian friar, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1969)
- 1923 – Allie Sherman, American football player and coach (d. 2015)
- 1966 – Daryl Johnston, American football player and sportscaster
- 1972 – Michael Kasprowicz, Australian cricketer
- 1974 – Ty Law, American football player
- 1981 – Andrew Johnson, English footballer
- 2000 – María Carlé, Argentine tennis player
HOLIDAYS and OBSERVANCES:
