In 1898, the United States invaded Puerto Rico in the Spanish-American War.
In 1952, Puerto Rico became a self-governing commonwealth of the United States.
In 1956, at 11:10 p.m., 45 miles south of Nantucket Island, the Italian ocean liner Andrea Doria and the Swedish ocean liner Stockholm collide in a heavy Atlantic fog.
In 1960, Roy Orbison reached No.2 on the US singles chart with ‘Only the Lonely,’ his first hit. The song was turned down by The Everly Brothers and Elvis Presley, so Orbison decided to record the song himself.
In 1972, The Associated Press reported that for the previous four decades, the U.S. Public Health Service and Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute had been allowing poor, rural Black male patients with syphilis to go without treatment, even die, to study the disease.
In 1978, Louise Joy Brown, the world’s first baby to be conceived via in vitro fertilization (IVF) is born at Oldham and District General Hospital in Manchester, England, to parents Lesley and Peter Brown.
In 1985, Rock Hudson, a Hollywood leading man of the 1950s and 1960s who made more than 60 films during his career, announces through a press release that he is suffering from acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS).
In 2010, the online whistleblower Wikileaks posted some 90,000 leaked U.S. military records, that amounted to a blow-by-blow account of the Afghanistan war, including unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killing and covert operations.