On this date in

42 BCE Brutus committed suicide after forces led by Mark Anthony and Octavian decisively defeated Brutus' forces.

1915 Between 25,000 and 33,000 women marched in New York City, demanding their right to vote.

1929 The New York Stock Exchange began to display panic signs.

1930 The first miniature golf tournament was completed in Chattanooga, Tenn.

1935 Gangster Dutch Schultz and three others were shot to death in a Newark, N.J., saloon.

1941 19,000 Jews were burned alive at Dalnik in Odessa by Romanian and German troops.

1942 The British army under Field Marshal Montgomery launched an offensive to drive Axis armies out of Egypt.

1944 The largest naval battle in history began in the Philippines.

1946 The United Nations General Assembly convened for the first time.

1958 An underground earthquake trapped 174 miners in Springhill, Nova Scotia.

1965 American forces in Vietnam launched the siege of Pleiku.

1973 President Richard M. Nixon agreed to turn White House tape recordings requested by the Watergate special prosecutor over to Judge John J. Sirica.

1983 A Marine barracks in Beirut was hit by a truck bomb, killing 241 Marines.

1987 The U.S. Senate rejected the Supreme Court nomination of Robert H. Bork, 58-42.

1989 A series of devastating explosions struck the Phillips Refinery in Pasadena, Texas, killing 23.

1998 Dr. Barnett Slepian, a doctor who performed abortions, was killed at his home in suburban Buffalo, N.Y., when a sniper fired through his kitchen window. (James Kopp was convicted of murder and is serving 25 years to life in prison.)

2001 The iPod was released.

2002 Gunmen seized a crowded Moscow theater, taking hundreds hostage and threatening to kill them unless the Russian army pulled out of Chechnya.

2003 Madame Chiang Kai-shek, widow of the Chinese nationalist leader, died in New York at age 105.

2006 Former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling was sentenced by a federal judge in Houston to 24 years, four months for his role in the company's collapse.

Born on this date:
Peter II (1715-1730)
Pierre Larousse (1817-1875)
Adlai E. Stevenson (1835-1914)
William Coolidge (1873-1975)
Felix Bloch (1905-1983)
Frederick Lanchester (1968-1946)
John Heisman (1869-1936)
Una O'Connor (1880-1959)
Frank Rizzo (1920-1991)
Johnny Carson (1925-2005)
Diana Dors (1931-1984)