The Capitulación de Toledo, signed by the Spanish crown, gave Pizarro the title of governor and captain-general over the lands he would conquer in Peru. Armed with this authority, Pizarro assembled a small force that within a few years captured the Inca emperor Atahualpa, sacked Cusco, and dismantled the largest empire in the pre-Columbian Americas, reshaping South America's political and demographic future.

A confrontation between a British sentry and a group of Bostonians escalated when soldiers of the 29th Regiment fired into the crowd, killing five colonists including Crispus Attucks, a man of African and Native American descent. Paul Revere's engraving of the scene became a piece of revolutionary propaganda, and the event is remembered as one of the sparks that lit the fuse of the American Revolution.

Speaking at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, with President Truman seated behind him, Churchill warned that Soviet influence had split the continent, stating 'from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.' The speech shocked many Western listeners still allied in spirit with wartime partner Moscow and became a defining rhetorical marker of the emerging Cold War.

Stalin suffered a stroke on March 1, 1953, and lay unattended for hours because his guards feared entering his room uninvited. He died four days later at his Kuntsevo dacha outside Moscow. His death triggered a scramble for power among Soviet leaders, a brief thaw in political repression, and eventual denunciation of his crimes by Nikita Khrushchev three years later.

Following the chaotic aftermath of independence from Belgium in 1960, the assassination of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, and years of secessionist conflict and foreign intervention, Congo attempted to stabilize through elections that proved deeply flawed and contested. The instability that followed helped pave the way for Joseph-Désiré Mobutu's coup later that year, which installed a dictatorship lasting more than three decades.

Launched in November 1965, Venera 3 lost communication before entering the Venusian atmosphere due to a failure in its radio system, so it returned no data about the planet it struck. Even so, its impact on Venus's surface marked the first time an object built by humans had reached the surface of another planet, a milestone in the Soviet Union's aggressive planetary exploration program.

Pioneer 10 launched later that same month from Cape Canaveral atop an Atlas-Centaur rocket, eventually becoming the first human-made object to travel through the asteroid belt, the first to fly by Jupiter, and, ultimately, the first spacecraft to leave the solar system on an escape trajectory, carrying a golden plaque intended as a message to any intelligence that might find it.

The Apple II Plus shipped with 48KB of standard memory, expandable to 64KB, and introduced Applesoft BASIC built into ROM, replacing the earlier Integer BASIC. Though less revolutionary than the original 1977 Apple II, the Plus extended the platform's commercial momentum, cementing Apple's early lead in a personal computer market that IBM had not yet entered.