On this day in 1858 in Lourdes, France, 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous, a miller's daughter, first had visions of the Virgin Mary that were authenticated by Pope Pius IX in 1862, initiating the cult of Our Lady of Lourdes.

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1989: The Reverend Barbara Clementine Harris of the Protestant Episcopal Church became the first female bishop of an apostolic succession church.

1945: The Yalta Conference between the Allied leaders of World War II came to a close.

1929: A committee met in Paris to devise the Young Plan, a revision of the Dawes Plan of 1924, that renegotiated Germany's reparations for World War I.

1929: Benito Mussolini of Italy and Pietro Gasparri of the Vatican signed the Lateran Treaty, recognizing papal sovereignty over Vatican City, an enclave in Rome.

René Descartes

Often called the father of modern philosophy, French scientist, mathematician, and philosopher René Descartes, who erected new epistemic foundations with the dictum “I think, therefore I am,” died this day in 1650.

On this day in 1996, world chess champion Garry Kasparov began a six-round match against Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer built by IBM, in which Kasparov claimed a 4–2 victory (though Deep Blue won a rematch the following year).

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1990: The spacecraft Galileo flew past Venus on its way to Jupiter.

1962: U.S. airman Francis Gary Powers, captured pilot of the U-2 plane downed by the Soviet Union in 1960, was exchanged for jailed Soviet informant Rudolf Abel.

1846: The British conquered the Sikhs in northwestern India in the Battle of Sobraon, the most decisive engagement of the First Sikh War.

1837: Russian author Aleksandr Pushkin was killed in a duel defending his wife's honour.

Mark Spitz

Mark Spitz, 1999

American swimmer Mark Spitz, born this day in 1950, became the first athlete to capture seven gold medals in a single Olympics, winning four individual and three team events at the 1972 Games in Munich, West Germany.