On Feb. 4, 1783, Britain’s King George III proclaimed a formal cessation of hostilities in the American Revolutionary War.
In 1789, electors chose George Washington to be the first president of the United States.
In 1801, John Marshall was confirmed by the Senate as chief justice of the United States.
In 1861, delegates from six Southern states that had recently seceded from the Union met in Montgomery, Alabama, to form the Confederate States of America.
In 1913, Rosa Parks, a Black woman whose 1955 refusal to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama, city bus to a white man sparked a civil rights revolution, was born Rosa Louise McCauley in Tuskegee.
In 1945, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Josef Stalin began a wartime conference at Yalta.
In 1974, newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst, 19, was kidnapped in Berkeley, California, by the radical Symbionese Liberation Army.
In 1976, more than 23,000 people died when a severe earthquake struck Guatemala with a magnitude of 7.5, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
In 1977, eleven people were killed when two Chicago Transit Authority trains collided on an elevated track.
In 1997, a civil jury in Santa Monica, California, found O.J. Simpson liable for the deaths of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ronald Goldman.
In 1999, senators at President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial voted to permit the showing of portions of Monica Lewinsky’s videotaped deposition.
In 2004, the social networking website Facebook had its beginnings as Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg launched “Thefacebook.”
In 2020, thousands of medical workers in Hong Kong were on strike for a second day to demand that the country’s border with China be completely closed to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus; the territory reported its first death from the virus and the second known fatality outside China.