1916: Jeannette Rankin of Montana won election to the U.S. House of Representatives, becoming the first woman elected to either chamber of Congress.

1940: Washington state’s original Tacoma Narrows Bridge, nicknamed “Galloping Gertie,” collapsed into Puget Sound during a windstorm just four months after opening to traffic.

1944: President Franklin D. Roosevelt won an unprecedented fourth term in office, defeating Republican Thomas E. Dewey.

1972: President Richard Nixon was reelected in a landslide over Democrat George McGovern.

1989: L. Douglas Wilder won the governor’s race in Virginia, becoming the first elected Black governor in U.S. history; David N. Dinkins was elected New York City’s first Black mayor.

1991: Basketball star Magic Johnson announced that he had tested positive for HIV and was retiring.

1996: NASA launched the Mars Global Surveyor from Cape Canaveral, Florida, the agency’s first mission to the red planet in about two decades. The orbiter became the longest-operating spacecraft sent to Mars before NASA lost contact with it in November 2006.