Having passed the House of Representatives 119-56 on January 31, the amendment banning slavery and involuntary servitude went to the states on February 1, 1865. President Abraham Lincoln, though his signature wasn't constitutionally required, added his own approval to the document. Ratification followed by December 1865, formally ending legal slavery in the United States.
Edited initially by James Murray, the OED's first installment appeared as a slim, 352-page fascicle covering only a fraction of the alphabet. Begun in 1857 by the Philological Society, the project aimed to trace every English word's history through quotations. It would take another 44 years to complete the full first edition.
Following the constituent assembly's adoption of a Soviet-modeled constitution, Yugoslavia formally became a federal socialist republic composed of six constituent nations, led by Josip Broz Tito. The move consolidated Tito's Partisan movement's wartime victory over royalists and occupying Axis forces into a lasting state structure that endured, with dramatic upheavals, until the 1990s.
Racing to answer the Soviet Union's Sputnik launch, the U.S. Army and Jet Propulsion Laboratory put Explorer 1 into orbit atop a Juno I rocket. The satellite carried a Geiger counter designed by physicist James Van Allen, whose data revealed the radiation belts that now bear his name — the first major scientific discovery of the Space Age.
Ezell Blair Jr., Franklin McCain, Joseph McNeil, and David Richmond, freshmen at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, sat at the whites-only counter and ordered coffee. Refused service, they stayed until closing. Their peaceful protest ignited a movement: within weeks, sit-ins spread to 54 cities in nine states, becoming a defining tactic of the civil rights movement.
Flying from Paris on an Air France jet, Khomeini returned to a Tehran convulsed by revolution against Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. An estimated several million people lined the streets to welcome him. Ten days later, the Shah's government fell, and Khomeini became Iran's Supreme Leader, founding the Islamic Republic that has governed the country ever since.
In the aftermath of Vietnam's invasion that toppled Pol Pot's genocidal Khmer Rouge regime in early January 1979, Vietnamese troops and the newly installed People's Republic of Kampuchea government worked through late January and February to secure territory against retreating Khmer Rouge remnants, beginning a decade-long occupation.
Sixteen days after Columbia lifted off, a chunk of insulating foam that struck its left wing during launch proved fatal: superheated gas breached the wing during re-entry, tearing the orbiter apart 200,000 feet above Texas. All seven crew members died, including Israel's first astronaut, Ilan Ramon. The disaster grounded the shuttle fleet for over two years.