Michael King Jr. is born in Atlanta, later renamed Martin Luther King Jr., the man who would lead America's civil rights movement.

Richard Nixon is born in a small house his father built in Yorba Linda, California, to a Quaker family of modest means.

Soviet authorities expelled Leon Trotsky, once the Red Army's founder and Lenin's closest lieutenant, deporting him to Turkey after years of internal exile.

Arizona Governor John C. Phillips signed a bill making the state the last in the U.S. to legally recognize February 14th's holiday, a footnote in state legislative trivia.

The French parliament approved funding for the Maginot Line, a vast fortified barrier meant to prevent another German invasion.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences held its first awards ceremony in Hollywood, a private 15-minute dinner event honoring films from 1927 and 1928.

Jomo Kenyatta, later Kenya's founding president, addressed a rally in London protesting British colonial land policies affecting the Kikuyu people.

The Dow Jones fell nearly 13% in a single session, one of the earliest brutal blows of the crash that ushered in the Great Depression.

The New York Stock Exchange crashes as panic selling wipes out billions of dollars, triggering the first tremors of the Great Depression.

Stock prices continued their catastrophic slide days after the initial crash, wiping out fortunes and accelerating the plunge into the Great Depression.

The New York Stock Exchange collapsed catastrophically as 16 million shares traded, wiping out fortunes and igniting the Great Depression.

French lawmakers approved funding for a chain of fortifications along the German border, a defensive strategy that would prove disastrously outflanked in 1940.

Mussolini approved plans to carve the Via della Conciliazione through Rome's medieval quarter, cementing the reconciliation between Italy and the Vatican.

Chinese paleontologist Pei Wenzhong discovered the first complete skullcap of Homo erectus pekinensis at Zhoukoudian, near Peking.