Congress passed and Jefferson signed legislation ending the legal importation of enslaved Africans into the United States, taking effect January 1, 1808 — the earliest date permitted under the Constitution's twenty-year moratorium on such a ban. The law did nothing to end slavery itself, and a thriving domestic slave trade continued to grow for decades afterward.

Fifty-nine delegates gathered in a drafty, unfinished building at Washington-on-the-Brazos to sign a declaration modeled on America's own, accusing Mexican President Antonio López de Santa Anna of abandoning constitutional government. The declaration came just days before the Alamo fell, and it set the stage for a nine-year independent republic before annexation by the United States in 1845.

Amid the first great American bicycle craze, inventors filed a wave of patents in early 1869 improving the velocipede, the pedal-driven forerunner of the modern bicycle. These crude 'boneshakers,' with wooden or iron-banded wheels and no suspension, nonetheless launched a transatlantic fad for velocipede rinks and racing that prefigured the bicycle boom of the 1890s.

Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin was born to a collective farm carpenter and a dairy worker in the small village of Klushino, western Russia. Twenty-seven years later he would orbit the Earth aboard Vostok 1, becoming the first human to journey into space and an instant global celebrity for the Soviet Union.

Following his historic three-orbit flight aboard Friendship 7 on February 20, 1962, astronaut John Glenn was feted with ticker-tape parades and public celebrations in early March, a wave of national pride that underscored how deeply the space race had gripped the American public. His flight had come nearly a year after Yuri Gagarin's, but it proved the US could compete in orbital spaceflight.

United Nations troops seized the mining town of Kolwezi, extinguishing the last organized resistance of Katanga's secessionist government. The province's attempted breakaway, backed by mining interests eager to control its copper and cobalt wealth, had destabilized the newly independent Congo since 1960 and contributed to the killing of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba.

A Washington grand jury investigating the Watergate scandal voted to name President Richard Nixon an unindicted co-conspirator alongside seven aides already charged with obstruction of justice. The finding was kept under seal at the request of prosecutors, who feared indicting a sitting president, but it later became a critical piece of evidence in the impeachment process that pushed Nixon toward resignation five months later.

The UN Security Council passed Resolution 686, and Iraq accepted its terms — including the release of prisoners, renunciation of claims to Kuwait, and disclosure of mines and booby traps — formally ending large-scale combat operations of the Gulf War. The 100-hour ground campaign had already driven Saddam Hussein's forces out of Kuwait in a rout that left burning oil fields and the notorious 'Highway of Death' behind.