1997—Quaker Oats pays $1.8 million to settle a lawsuit over their secret feeding of radioactive oatmeal to developmentally-disabled kids.
1995—Bill and Monica enjoy their third tryst in a White House study.
1970—Congress repeals the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
1970—Associated Milk Producers, Inc. gets $100 million in price supports in exchange for its $2 million donation to the Nixon campaign.
1969—Hitmen hired by United Mine Workers President Tony Boyle murder his rival,Joseph “Jock” Yablonski, along with his wife and daughter.
1952—The Tuskeegee Institute reports that for the first time since 1881, a year has passed without a lynching.
1947—The Israeli paramilitary outfit Haganah kills 20 to 70 Arabs in retaliation for the previous days’ Arab retaliation against an earlier Irgun attack against Arabs at a Haifa refinery.
1929—“I see nothing in the present situation that is either menacing or warrants pessimism,” says Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon.
1904—At midnight, for the first time, a ball drops in Times Square to mark the New Year.
1901—This year’s U.S. lynching toll: worst ever—105 Blacks, 25 whites.
1879—Edison shows off the first practical electric light bulb.
1761—Lydia (Hall) Fowle, wife of N.H. Gazette founder Daniel Fowle, dies in Portsmouth at the age of 36.