Today
1953 - Sen. John Fitzgerald Kennedy of Massachusetts marries Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, a photographer for the Washington Time-Herald, at St. Mary's Church in Newport, Rhode Island.
1953 - Six months after the death of Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev succeeds him with his election as first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
1977 - Steven Bitko, leader of South Africa's "Black Consciousness Movement," dies of severe head trauma on the stone floor of a prison in Pretoria. Six days earlier, he suffered a major blow to his skull during a police interrogation in Port Elizabeth.
Tomorrow
1847 - Gen. Winfield Scott wins the last major battle of the Mexican-American War, storming the ancient Chapultepec fortress at the edge of Mexico City. For the first time in U.S. history, the Stars and Stripes flew over a foreign capital.
1916 - Roald Dahl, author of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" (1964) and "James and the Giant Peach" (1961), is born in South Wales.
1993 - Representatives of Israel and Palestine meet on the South Lawn of the White House and sign a framework for peace - the "Declaration of Principles."
Wednesday
1959 - A Soviet rocket crashes into the moon's surface, becoming the first man-made object sent from Earth to reach the lunar surface.
1964 - Writer John Steinbeck is presented with the U.S. Medal of Freedom. For his writing, Steinbeck was also awarded the 1962 - Nobel Prize and a 1939 Pulitzer Prize for "Grapes of Wrath".
1982 - Princess Grace of Monaco - American actress Grace Kelly - dies when her car plunges off a mountain road by the Cote D'Azur. She was 52 years old.
Thursday
1954 - The famous picture of Marilyn Monroe, born Norma Jean Mortenson, laughing as her skirt is blown up by the blast from a subway vent, is shot during the filming of "The Seven Year Itch". The scene infuriated her then husband, Joe DiMaggio, and the couple divorced shortly after.
1963 - A church bombing in an affluent black neighborhood in Birmingham, Alabama, leaves four young girls dead. Denise McNair, 11 years old, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley and Addie Mae Collins, all 14 years old, were killed at the 16th Street Baptist Church, a site of past civil rights rallies. They were attending Sunday services when the dynamite bomb planted by the Ku Klux Klan exploded.
Friday
1620 - The Mayflower sails from Plymouth, England, bound for the New World with 102 passengers.
1893 - The largest land run in history begins with more than 100,000 people pouring into the Cherokee Strip of Oklahoma to claim valuable land that had once belonged to Native Americans.
1940 - Congress passes the Burke-Wadsworth Act by wide margins in both houses, and the first peacetime draft in the history of the United States is imposed. Selective service was born.