In 1800, Congress held its first session in the partially completed U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C.

In 1869, the Suez Canal opened in Egypt.

In 1968, the last minutes of a tense NFL matchup on NBC between the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders were preempted by the children’s film “Heidi.” The network received thousands of calls from angry viewers and formally apologized.

In 1973, President Richard Nixon told a gathering of Associated Press managing editors at a televised news conference in Orlando, Florida: “People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook.”

In 1989, an estimated 10,000-15,000 Czechoslovakian students demonstrated in Prague against Communist rule; hundreds of thousands joined the protests in the following days.

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