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• In 1793, Frenchman Jean Pierre Blanchard, using a hot-air balloon, flew between Philadelphia and Woodbury, N.J.
• In 1861, Mississippi became the second state to secede from the Union, the same day the Star of the West, a merchant vessel bringing reinforcements and supplies to Federal troops at Fort Sumter, S.C., retreated because of artillery fire.
• In 1913, Richard Milhous Nixon, the 37th president of the United States, was born in Yorba Linda, Calif.
• In 1914, the fraternity Phi Beta Sigma was founded at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
• In 1931, Bobbi Trout and Edna May Cooper broke an endurance record for female aviators as they returned to Mines Field in Los Angeles after flying a Curtiss Robin monoplane continuously for 122 hours and 50 minutes.
• In 1945, during World War II, American forces began landing at Lingayen Gulf in the Philippines.
• In 1951, the United Nations headquarters in New York officially opened.
• In 1964, anti-U.S. rioting broke out in the Panama Canal Zone, resulting in the deaths of 21 Panamanians and four U.S. soldiers.
• In 1972, reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, speaking by telephone from the Bahamas to reporters in Hollywood, said a purported autobiography of him by Clifford Irving was a fake.
• In 1987, the White House released a Jan. 1986 memorandum prepared for President Ronald Reagan by Lt. Col. Oliver L. North showing a link between U.S. arms sales to Iran and the release of American hostages in Lebanon.
• In 1997, a Comair commuter plane crashed 18 miles short of the Detroit Metropolitan Airport, killing all 29 people on board.
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• Ten years ago: Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced that the nation's threat level had been lowered from orange ("high") to yellow ("elevated"). Officials said Pentagon lawyers determined that former Iraq leader Saddam Hussein had been a prisoner of war since his capture. An Ohio woman who'd claimed to have lost a lottery ticket worth $162 million was charged with filing a false police report. (Elecia Battle was later convicted of the misdemeanor and put on one year's probation.)
• Five years ago: The Illinois House voted 114-1 to impeach Gov. Rod Blagojevich (blah-GOY'-uh-vich), who defiantly insisted again that he had committed no crime. (The Illinois Senate unanimously voted to remove Blagojevich from office 20 days later.) President-elect Barack Obama announced he had picked retired Adm.

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