2002 - Singer Peggy Lee, whose sultry voice belted out blues, jazz and ballads for more than four decades, died at her Bel Air home. She was 81. Lee’s daughter, Nicki Lee Foster, said on the singer’s website that Lee had died of a heart attack. She suffered a stroke three years ago. Lee repeatedly battled injury and ill health, including heart trouble, in a spectacular career that brought her a Grammy, an Oscar nomination and sold-out houses worldwide. During more than 50 years in show business, which began during a troubled childhood and endured through four broken marriages, she recorded hit songs with the Benny Goodman band, wrote songs for a Disney movie and starred on Broadway in a short-lived autobiographical show, Peg.
Other important events
1732 - Russia gives up claims to certain Persian territories under Treaty of Riascha.
1793 - France’s King Louis XVI, condemned for treason, is executed on the guillotine.
1908 - New York City women are prohibited from smoking in public.
1919 - Sinn Fein Congress in Dublin, Ireland, adopts Declaration of Independence.
1924 - Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Lenin dies of a stroke at age 55.
1925 - Albania becomes a republic.
1949 - Chiang Kai-Shek resigns from China presidency following Nationalist Party reversals.
1950 - Author George Orwell dies in London.
1954 - The first atomic submarine, the USS Nautilus is launched at Groton, US.
1970 - World’s largest airplane, Boeing 747, makes its first commercial flight.
1972 - Manipur, Meghalaya and Tripura become separate states in the Indian union.
1976 - The supersonic Concorde jet is put into commercial service by Britain and France.
1977 - US President Jimmy Carter pardons almost all Vietnam War draft evaders.
1986 - A car bomb blast kills 27 in east Beirut, near the office of President Ameen Gemayel’s Phalange Party.
1990 - East Germany’s Communist Party expels Egon Krenz, the leader who oversaw the opening of the Berlin Wall.
1994 - Syrian President Hafez Al Assad’s eldest son Bassel is killed in a car crash.
1998 - Pope John Paul II arrives on a historic five-day trip to Cuba.
2000 - Former Lebanese Prime Minister Saeb Salam dies of heart failure at the age of 95.
2005 - A car bomb outside a Shiite mosque in Baghdad kills at least 14.
2006 - Ebrahim Rugova, the first president of Kosovo, dies at the age of 62.
2008 - Israel launches an advanced spy satellite capable of tracking events in Iran.
2013 - US President Barack Obama takes his second oath of office at the US Capitol in Washington.
2015 - The US and Cuba open two days of historic talks to end decades of Cold War-era animosity in Havana.
