1969 - The Rolling Stones give a free concert in Altamont, SF Bay area, finishing their US tour which had been criticised by fans for their unusually high ticket prices. 

1965 – The Grateful Dead's first concert performance under this new name.

1956 – The Million Dollar Quartet (Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, and Johnny Cash) get together at Sun Studio for the first and last time.

1992 – A test engineer for Sema Group uses a personal computer to send the world's first text message via the Vodafone network to the phone of a colleague.

1976 – An assassination attempt is made on Bob Marley in Kingston, Jamaica just two days before the "Smile Jamaica", a free concert.

1970 – The United States Environmental Protection Agency begins operations.

1942 – World War II: During the Manhattan Project, a team led by Enrico Fermi initiates the first artificial self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.

1955 – American Civil Rights Movement: In Montgomery, Alabama, seamstress Rosa Parks refuses to give up her bus seat to a white man and is arrested for violating the city's racial segregation laws, an incident which leads to that city's bus boycott.

1982 – Michael Jackson's sixth solo studio album, Thriller, is released worldwide, ultimately to become the best-selling record album in history.

1877 – Thomas Edison demonstrates his phonograph for the first time.

2001 – A hydrogen atmosphere is discovered on the extra-solar planet Osiris by the Hubble Space Telescope, the first atmosphere detected on an extrasolar planet.

1971 – The Soviet space program's Mars 2 orbiter releases a descent module. It malfunctions and crashes, but it is the first man-made object to reach the surface of Mars.

 Red_Dragon wrote:
 

1976 – "Anarchy in the U.K.", the debut single of the Sex Pistols, is released, heralding the arrival of punk rock

1922 – Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon become the first people to enter the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun in over 3,000 years.

1476 – Vlad the Impaler defeats Basarab Laiota with the help of Stephen the Great and Stephen V Báthory and becomes the ruler of Wallachia for the third time.

1971 – During a severe thunderstorm over Washington state, a hijacker calling himself Dan Cooper (aka D. B. Cooper) parachutes from a Northwest Orient Airlines plane with $200,000 in ransom money. He has never been found.

1992 – The first smartphone, the IBM Simon, is introduced at COMDEX in Las Vegas, Nevada.

1963 – The BBC broadcasts An Unearthly Child (starring William Hartnell), the first episode of the first story from the first series of Doctor Who, which is now the world's longest running science fiction drama.

1924 – Edwin Hubble's discovery, that the Andromeda "nebula" is actually another island galaxy far outside of our own Milky Way, is first published in The New York Times.