A shutdown of the U.S. federal government began when President Donald Trump declined to sign an appropriations bill. The shutdown lasted for 34 days.

U.S. President Barack Obama signed legislation to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the policy regarding the service of homosexuals in the military; it took effect in 2011.

The Constitution of the Republic of Croatia was promulgated, granting such civil rights as freedom of speech, religion, information, and association, as well as guaranteeing the equality of nationalities. [Test your knowledge of European history.]

U.S. President Ronald Reagan authorized the release of 30 million pounds of cheese from a federal government stockpile for distribution to low-income residents. For Reagan, it was another step toward his goal of reducing the role of government in the country’s economic life, while the cheese itself took on multiple cultural meanings.

Rescue helicopters arrived at the crash site of Uruguayan Air Force flight 571 and evacuated a first group of survivors, two months after the plane went down in the Andes Mountains in Argentina. Of the 45 people aboard the plane, only 16 survived.

The movie Doctor Zhivago, David Lean’s adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s novel, had its world premiere. Starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie, it became one of cinema’s highest-grossing films. [Sort fact from fiction in our quiz about film.]

U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill met in Washington, D.C., to discuss World War II, two weeks after the Pearl Harbor attack. [How much do you know about World War II?]

French army officer Alfred Dreyfus was sentenced to life in prison for treason for allegedly selling military secrets. His conviction was based on specious evidence, and publicity around the trial was fueled by antisemitism (Dreyfus was Jewish), sparking a controversy that divided France.

Srinivasa Ramanujan, a self-taught Indian mathematician who made many pioneering discoveries and whose story was told in the movie The Man Who Knew Infinity (2015), was born in Erode in what is today Tamil Nadu.

Frank B. Kellogg, a U.S. secretary of state who won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1929, was born in Potsdam, New York. [Test your knowledge of the Nobel Prize.]

Guru Gobind Singh, the Indian spiritual leader who is revered as the 10th and last of the human Sikh Gurus, was born in Patna.

The member states of the Swiss Confederation concluded the Diet of Stans, an agreement whereby civil war was averted.

The Dominican order was sanctioned by Pope Honorius III. [How much do you know about the history of Roman Catholicism?]

“At the winter solstice there was an eclipse of the Sun such as has never happened before,” wrote Leo the Deacon in the earliest account of the solar corona that can be definitely linked to a datable eclipse. “Everyone could see the disk of the Sun without brightness, deprived of light, and a certain dull and feeble glow, like a narrow headband, shining round the extreme parts of the edge of the disk. ”