1582 - In Stratford-upon-Avon, 18 year-old William Shakespeare and 26 year-old Anne Hathaway pay a 40-pound bond for their marriage license (Shakespeare would later become one of the greatest playwrights in history).
1862 - American Civil War: Battle of Cane Hill - Union troops led by General John Blunt push back Confederate forces commanded by General John Marmaduke into northwestern Arkansas' Boston Mountains.
1907 - In Haverville, Massachusetts, scrap-metal dealer Louis B. Mayer opens his first movie theater (in a few years he had the largest theater chain in New England and in 1917 he founded his own production company, which eventually became part of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer).
1987 - A Boeing 747 carrying South African Airways 295 crashes into the Indian Ocean, killing all 159 people on-board.
1987 - In Wappingers Falls, New York, Tawana Brawley is found wrapped in garbage bags, with feces smeared all over her body and a racial slur on her body (she later told police that she was held against her will for four days and repeatedly raped by a group of white men, one of which had a police badge. Her story did not check out, however).
1989 - Cold War: Velvet Revolution - With other communist regimes falling all around it and with growing street protests, the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia announces they will give up their monopoly on political power (elections held in December 1989 brought the first non-communist government to Czechoslovakia in more than 40 years).
1994 - In Portage, Wisconsin, convicted serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer is clubbed to death in by a deranged inmate in the Columbia Correctional Institute gymnasium.