On Nov. 2, 1889, North Dakota and South Dakota became the 39th and 40th states.
In 1913 actor Burt Lancaster was born in New York.
In 1917 British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, in what became known as the Balfour Declaration, expressed support for a "national home" for the Jews of Palestine.
In 1930 Haile Selassie was crowned emperor of Ethiopia.
In 1948 President Harry Truman stunned political experts by defeating Republican Thomas Dewey for election.
In 1959 Charles Van Doren admitted to a House panel that he had the questions and answers in advance of his appearances on the popular NBC-TV game show "Twenty-One."
In 1963 South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated in a military coup.
In 1966 actor David Schwimmer, a co-founder of Chicago's Lookingglass Theatre Company, was born in Astoria, N.Y.
In 1976 former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter defeated incumbent Gerald Ford to become the first president from the Deep South since the Civil War.
In 1983 President Ronald Reagan signed a bill establishing a national holiday on the third Monday in January to honor slain civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
In 1994 a jury in Pensacola, Fla., convicted Paul Hill in the shotgun murders of an abortion provider and his bodyguard; Hill was executed in 2003.
In 2003 in Durham, N.H., V. Gene Robinson was consecrated as the first openly homosexual bishop in the Episcopal Church.