In 1871, a massive Chicago fire destroyed more than 17,000 buildings, killed more than 300 people and left 90,000 homeless.
In 1918, Sgt. Alvin York of Tennessee became a World War I hero by single-handedly capturing a hill in the Argonne Forest of France, killing 20 enemy soldiers and capturing 132 others.
In 1919, the U.S. Congress passed the Volstead Act, prohibiting the sale or consumption of alcoholic beverages.
In 1967, communist revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara, an important figure in the 1959 Cuban revolution, was killed while leading a guerrilla war in Bolivia.
In 1991, a U.S. federal judge in Anchorage, Alaska, approved a $1 billion settlement against Exxon for the Valdez oil spill.
In 1993, the U.S. Justice Department, in its report on the 51-day siege at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, concluded the cult had caused the fire that destroyed the compound and killed at least 75 people.
In 1997, three years after the death of longtime North Korean ruler Kim Il Sung, his son, Kim Jong Il, officially inherited his father's title of general secretary of the Communist Party.
In 2003, about $19 billion in peach-colored, redesigned $20 bills made their official debut across the United States.
In 2004, for the first time the Nobel Peace Prize went to an African woman, Dr. Wangari Maathai, an environmental activist from Kenya.
In 2005, tens of thousands of people were killed by a 7.6-magnitude earthquake in Pakistan. Most of the victims were in the Kashmir region, others in India. (The death toll in what became known as the Kashmir earthquake was eventually set at about 79,000, with more than 100,000 people injured and the number of displaced estimated in the millions.)
In 2011, the head of the U.S. Energy Department's loan program, Jonathan Silver, resigned amid a fiscal firestorm over Solyndra, a solar energy company that filed for bankruptcy after receiving a $535 million federal loan guarantee.
In 2013, Indiana officials announced a winning $1 million lottery ticket was unclaimed during the required six-month period to do so. The money was retained by the state to be used for firefighter and teacher pensions and other funds.
A thought for the day: "Putting is a fascinating, aggravating, wonderful, terrible and almost incomprehensible part of the game of golf." -- Arnold Palmer
