1767-Meeting of the Royal Society appoints James Cook as head of an expedition to the Pacific Ocean to observe the transit of Venus on Tahiti in 1769 (will be Cook's 1st voyage aboard HMS Endeavour)
1833-The great Leonid Meteor shower recorded
1880-Best-selling American novel "Ben-Hur: A Tale of The Christ" by soldier Lew Wallace is published
1900-Exposition Universelle (World's Fair) in Paris closes after 50 million visitors - Art Nouveau style dominates
1927-Leon Trotsky is expelled from the Soviet Communist Party, paving the way for Joseph Stalin to consolidate complete power
1948-Japanese Prime Minister Hideki Tojo sentenced to death by war crimes tribunal
1970-Cyclone Bhola makes landfall in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), killing up to 500,000 people, making it the deadliest tropical cyclone ever recorded
1990-The World Wide Web is first proposed by CERN computer scientists Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau
1998-Vice President of the United States, Al Gore, symbolically signs the Kyoto Protocol, but the U.S. never ratifies it
2001-Taliban forces abandon Afghanistan's capital Kabul, ahead of advancing Afghan Northern Alliance troops
2015-Out Magazine names Barack Obama "Ally of the Year," Obama becomes first sitting U.S. President to pose for cover of a gay magazine