During a performance of Shakespeare's Henry VIII (then titled All Is True), a special-effects cannon meant to mark the king's entrance fired a wad of burning material that lodged in the thatched roof. Within an hour the entire wooden theater had burned to the ground. Remarkably, no one was seriously injured, save for a man whose breeches caught fire and were reportedly doused with a bottle of ale.
A British fleet under Admiral Sir Peter Parker attacked the unfinished palmetto-log Fort Sullivan guarding Charleston harbor, expecting an easy conquest of the rebellious South. Colonel William Moultrie's garrison, though outgunned, found that the fort's spongy palmetto logs absorbed cannonballs rather than splintering. After a nine-hour bombardment, the British fleet withdrew badly damaged, and the victory gave South Carolina's Palmetto flag its enduring symbol.
Antoinette Brown's ordination by the Congregational Church broke a barrier that had kept women out of formal religious leadership for centuries in American Protestantism. A graduate of Oberlin College, where she had to fight to be allowed to study theology at all, Brown went on to a long career as minister, abolitionist, and suffragist, living to see women finally win the vote in 1920.
As Greek troops expanded their foothold along Anatolia's Aegean coast in the chaotic aftermath of World War I, Turkish resistance movements gathered momentum. The occupation, backed by Allied powers under the Treaty of Sèvres framework, provoked fierce nationalist backlash. Mustafa Kemal, soon to be known as Atatürk, was already organizing the resistance that would culminate in the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923.
President Richard Nixon signed the Education Amendments of 1972 into law, a sprawling education bill whose Title IX provision, just 37 words long, prohibited sex discrimination in any educational program or activity receiving federal funding. Though barely debated at the time, Title IX would revolutionize opportunities for American women and girls in sports, admissions, and academics over the following decades, driving explosive growth in female athletic participation from grade school through college.
Space Shuttle Atlantis docked with the Russian space station Mir, marking the first time an American spacecraft had joined with a Russian one since the Apollo-Soyuz mission of 1975. The docking created a combined structure of roughly 225,000 pounds, the largest spacecraft ever assembled in orbit at that point, and inaugurated a new era of US-Russian cooperation that would culminate in the International Space Station.