On this day in 1610, Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei made the first recorded sighting of the planet Jupiter’s moons.

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On this day in 1907, Dr. Maria Montessori opened a new kind of school in an impoverished neighborhood in Rome.

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On this day in 1980, “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang became the first hip hop song ever to break into the Billboard Top 40.

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On this day in 1990, an overcrowded passenger train slammed into a parked freight train at a railway station in the Sindh province of Pakistan.

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On this day in 1946, William Joyce, better known to the British as Lord Haw-Haw, was put to death for betraying his country on behalf of Nazi Germany.

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On this day in 1974, President Richard Nixon established a maximum speed limit of 55 miles per hour on every highway in the United States.

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On this day in 1959, musician Johnny Cash rang in the new year by performing live at San Quentin State Prison in California.

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On this day in 1853, natural history artist and sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins hosted a New Year’s Eve dinner party inside a full-scale model of an Iguanodon.

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On this day in 1986, a British mining tradition came to an end when legislation officially ordered that all live canaries be released from the nation’s coal mines.

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On this day in 1851, retired sea captain Thomas Sullivan helped establish the first YMCA in the United States in Boston.

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