Chinese filmmaker Chloé Zhao became the first person of color to win the Academy Award for best director. She was recognized for Nomadland (2020), which was also named best picture. [Test your knowledge of the Academy Awards.]

John Havlicek, who is considered the best “sixth man” (bench player) in the history of the NBA, died at the age of 79. [How much do you know about basketball?]

A magnitude-7.8 earthquake struck near Kathmandu in Nepal, killing about 9,000 people. More than 600,000 structures in Kathmandu and nearby towns were damaged or destroyed. [Watch: How Nepal recovered from the 2015 earthquake.]

In a cost-saving measure, the water supply of Flint, Michigan, was switched from the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department to the Flint River, causing a public health crisis as residents were exposed to dangerously high levels of lead. [Find out why contaminated drinking water is so devastating to a community.]

American dancer and actress Ginger Rogers, who starred with Fred Astaire in numerous popular Hollywood musicals, died at the age of 83. [Take our women in classic cinema quiz.]

In Nicaragua, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro was sworn in as president, becoming the first woman to hold that office in Central America. [Test your knowledge of famous firsts for women.]

The Hubble Space Telescope, named for the foremost American astronomer of the 20th century, was put into operation by the crew of the space shuttle Discovery. The first sophisticated optical observatory placed into orbit around Earth, it was built in the United States under the supervision of NASA. [Read more about Edwin Hubble.]

The St. Lawrence Seaway officially opened, linking the Atlantic Ocean with the Great Lakes. It remains one of the largest civil engineering feats ever undertaken. [How much do you know about canals and straits?]

Giacomo Puccini’s opera Turandot, left incomplete when he died in 1924, was performed for the first time. [Take our quiz about opera.]

The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) landed at Gallipoli in western Turkey during World War I. The losses these troops suffered during the Gallipoli Campaign were enormous, and in 1920 this day became a holiday, called ANZAC Day, to honor them. It has evolved over decades to honor all soldiers from New Zealand and Australia. [Sort fact from fiction in our quiz about World War I.]

Edward R. Murrow, a radio and television broadcaster who was the most influential and esteemed figure in American broadcast journalism during its formative years, was born in Greensboro, North Carolina. [Sort fact from fiction in our quiz about famous Americans.]

New York became the first U.S. state to mandate license plates when Governor Benjamin Odell, Jr., signed a law ordering automobiles and motorcycles to display “the separate initials of the owner’s name placed upon the back thereof in a conspicuous place.” [How many U.S. license plates can you recognize?]

Guglielmo Marconi, a physicist who invented a successful system of radio telegraphy (1896) and received the Nobel Prize for Physics (1909), was born in Bologna, Italy. [Take our quiz about inventors and their inventions.]

Construction of the Suez Canal officially began. Completed 10 years later, the waterway connected the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea. [What’s the difference between canals and straits anyway?]

The Treaty of Amritsar, which settled Indo-Sikh relations for a generation, was concluded between Charles T. Metcalfe, representing the British East India Company, and Ranjit Singh, head of the Sikh kingdom of Punjab.

The first guillotine was erected, on the Place de Grève in Paris, to execute a highwayman. At first the machine was called a louisette, or louison, after its inventor, French surgeon and physiologist Antoine Louis. [How much do you know about words named for people?]

Petersburg, Virginia, was captured by British troops under William Phillips and Benedict Arnold during the American Revolution. [Watch an overview of the American Revolutionary War.]