► In 1799, the first president of the United States, George Washington, died at his Mount Vernon, Va., home at 67.
► In 1819, Alabama joined the Union as the 22d state.
► In 1861, Prince Albert, husband of Queen Victoria, died at Windsor Castle at 42.
► In 1911, Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen and his team became the first men to reach the South Pole, beating out a British expedition led by Robert F. Scott.
► In 1946, the United Nations General Assembly voted to establish UN headquarters in New York.
► In 1961, a school bus was hit by a passenger train near Greeley, Colo., killing 20 students.
► In 1981, Israel annexed the Golan Heights, which it had seized from Syria in 1967.
► In 1985, Wilma Mankiller became the first woman to lead a major American Indian tribe as she took office as principal chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.
► In 1986, the experimental aircraft Voyager, piloted by Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager, took off from California on the first nonstop, non-refueled flight around the world.
► In 2001, hundreds of US Marines occupied the Kandahar airport, carefully picking through unexploded weaponry and debris left by the Taliban as the US military relocated its main base in southern Afghanistan.
► In 2006, South Korea’s Ban Ki-moon was sworn in as the eighth secretary-general of the United Nations. A British police inquiry concluded that the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales, and her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, in a 1997 Paris car crash were a “tragic accident,’’ and allegations of a murder conspiracy were unfounded. Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun died in New York at 83. Actor Mike Evans, who had played Lionel on “All in the Family’’ and “The Jeffersons,’’ died in Twentynine Palms, Calif., at 57.
► In 2010, the White House insisted the implementation of President Obama’s landmark health care law would not be affected by a negative federal court ruling, and the Justice Department said it would appeal.
