| 2003: | | Hu Jintao succeeded Jiang Zemin as the president of China. |
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| 1917: | | | During the first phase of the Russian Revolution, Tsar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate, thus ending the rule of the Romanov dynasty. |
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| 1875: | | | Pope Pius IX appointed John McCloskey the first American cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church. |
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| 1781: | | American revolutionaries won a strategic victory over the British at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse in North Carolina. |
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| 1614: | | | Franciscus Sylvius, whose studies helped shift medical emphasis from mystical speculation to a rational application of the laws of physics, was born in Hanau, Germany. |
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