Who was born on this date?

211 - Lucius Septimius Severus, the Roman emperor responsible for making the empire's government a military monarchy, died.

1783 - England officially proclaimed an end to hostilities in America.

1787 - Shays' Rebellion, an uprising of Massachusetts farmers led by Daniel Shays, ended with defeat at Petersham.

1789 - Presidential electors met and chose George Washington as America's first president.

1861 - America's 25-year-long Apache wars began with the arrest of the Apache Chief Cochise.

1874 - The Battle of Kumasi ended the Ashanti War between Britain and Ghana.

1895 - In Chicago, Illinois, the Van Buren Street Bridge opened.

1901 - In New York City, "Captain Jinks of the Horse Marines" opened, marking the first time Ethel Barrymore was billed as a star.

1904 - The Russo-Japanese War began when Japan laid siege to Port Arthur.

1913 - Louis Perlman, of New York City, received a patent for demountable tire-carrying rims, commonly known as wheels.

1924 - Mahatma Gandhi was released after spending two years in jail in Bombay.

1926 - John Giola, of New York City, earned fame as the Charleston endurance dance champion. As the new dance craze swept the United States, Giola decided to cash in on it by dancing, non-stop, for 22 hours and 30 minutes.

1927 - British driver Malcolm Campbell broke the world land speed record in his car Bluebird, driving at 174.224 miles per hour.

1932 - At Lake Placid, New York, the Winter Olympics were held in the United States for the first time. The venue would be home to the Winter Olympics again in 1980, when the United States Hockey Team won its "Do you believe in miracles?" gold medal.

1935 - For the first time, CBS radio presented "Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch". The program was about life in Kentucky shantytown.

1937 - On Decca Records, Glen Gray and his Casa Loma Orchestra recorded "A Study in Brown".

1938 - Adolf Hitler became Germany's war minister and Joachim von Ribbentrop took over foreign affairs.

1938 - Thornton Wilder's play, "Our Town", opened in New York City at the Henry Miller Theatre. The play won the writer a Pulitzer prize.

1939 - World mile record-holder, Glenn Cunningham, said in a newspaper, "running a four-minute mile is beyond human effort," adding that the best mile run will always be 4:01.66. That mark has been since been broken several times. Jim Ryun did it on several occasions; and more recently a time of 3:44:39 was set by Noureddine Morceli from Algeria.

1941 - The United Service Organization (USO) was founded to provide support worldwide for United States service people and their families.

1945 - Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin met at Yalta in the Crimea to discuss plans for the defeat of the Axis powers and to decide on the post-war future.

1948 - Ceylon became a self-governing independent state within the British Commonwealth.

1952 - Former baseball great, Jackie Robinson, was named Director of Communication for NBC, becoming the first black executive of a major radio-TV network.

1953 - Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis took a dramatic turn when they starred in the film, "The Stooge", premiering at the Paramount Theatre in New York City.

1957 - New York's Smith-Corona Manufacturing Inc. began to sell portable electric typewriters. The first "portable" machine weighed 19 pounds! Soon, other manufacturers began offering similar models that were made of lighter weight plastics.

1962 - "Nedelya", a supplement to the Soviet newspaper "Izvestia", claimed, "...baseball is an old Russian game."

1962 - Francisco Orlich Bolmarich was elected president of Costa Rica.

1964 - United States weekly publication Newsweek was the first American magazine to carry a cover story on the Beatles.

1966 - An All Nippon Airways Boeing 727 jet aircraft crashed in Tokyo Bay, killing 133 passengers and crew.

1969 - Bowie Kuhn took office as Commissioner of Baseball. He served only a six-month term, succeeding General William Eckert.

1971 - British carmaker Rolls Royce declared itself bankrupt.

1972 - Zambian President Kenneth Kuanda banned the opposition United Progressive Party and arrested its leader, Simon Kapepwe, together with more than 120 members.

1974 - Patricia Hearst, the grand-daughter of the late William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army.

1974 - Grenada achieved independence within the British Commonwealth.

1976 - Lourenco Marques, the capital of Mozambique, was renamed Maputo.

1976 - An earthquake measuring 7.5 on the Richter scale and resulting mudslides caused the deaths of 23,000 people just north of Guatemala City; 1.5 million people were made homeless.

1978 - Junius Jayawardene was sworn in as Sri Lanka's first president.

1982 - Great Britain's Laker Airways, a pioneer of cheap transatlantic air fares, collapsed.

1983 - Singer Karen Carpenter died of heart failure due to anorexia nervosa at age 33, at her parents' home in Downey, California. The singer, who had performed with her brother, Richard, would be best-remembered for her songs (They Long to Be) Close to You and We've Only Just Begun, which dominated the songs of choice for weddings throughout the '70s and '80s. The untimely death of the young, velvet-throated Grammy Award winner saddened and shocked the world. Her death shed new light on the devastating consequences of anorexia, an eating disorder brought on by compulsive dieting. At one low point in Carpenter's career, she was forced to cancel a command performance before Queen Elizabeth II of England, and a concert tour of Europe and the Orient, due to the illness. Standing five feet, four inches, she had dieted down to 90 pounds.

1987 - Dennis Conner, Tom Whidden and Peter Isler won the America’s Cup for yachting from Australia with "Stars and Stripes ’87".

1987 - Flamboyant pianist Liberace died at age 67 in his block-long palace in Palms Springs, California, officially of a brain disease. At one time, the entertainer was the highest-paid performer in Las Vegas.

1990 - Nine Israeli tourists and two Egyptian guards were killed when masked assailants opened fire on a bus en route to Cairo.

1992 - Loyal troops put down an attempted coup against President Carlos Andres Perez in Venezuela.

1994 - Mortar bombs killed nine people in a food line in Serb-besieged Sarajevo.

1994 - Polish Finance Minister Marek Borowski resigned after clashing with Prime Minister Waldemar Pawlak.

1996 - Rob Pilatus of the defunct pop duo Milli Vanilli was arrested in Los Angeles after witnesses said he tried to break into a car and force his way into a house. He was charged with eight criminal counts accusing him of attacking two people. Pilatus, age 31, was also accused in a December 21, 1995 incident of hitting a man with a lamp during a dispute.

1996 - NBC aired the first of two parts of the mini-series Gulliver's Travels, starring Ted Danson as the title character. The venture, with its huge financial investment, had the potential for being a giant flop, but it was a gamble that paid off. The show was NBC's highest-rated miniseries in four years, and most critics praised its faithfulness to the Jonathan Swift tale.

1996 - A Colombian cargo plane crashed into homes near the Paraguayan capital Asuncion, killing at least 22 people.

1997 - 73 Israeli soldiers were killed when two military helicopters collided in midair in a storm in northern Israel.