1587 --- Mary, Queen of Scots, was beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle in England after she was implicated in a plot to murder her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I.

1898 --- John Sherman of Worcester, Massachusetts received a patent for the first machine to fold and seal envelopes.

1910 --- Chicago businessman William D. Boyce incorporated the Boy Scouts of America. He didn’t, however, conceptualize the scouting movement -- the Boy Scouts were originated by Englishman, Sir Robert S.S. Baden-Powell. It seems that Mr. Boyce was visiting England and one foggy day in London town, he lost his way. A young boy guided him, but refused any monetary reward. A surprised Mr. Boyce queried as to why. The boy replied that he was a Scout and Scouts did not accept a reward for doing a good turn. This gesture of good will so inspired Boyce that he searched out Baden-Powell to learn more about the British Scouts. Upon his return to the United States, he formed the Boy Scouts of America.

1915 --- D.W. Griffith's silent movie epic about the Civil War, "The Birth of a Nation," premiered in Los Angeles.

1922 --- President Warren Harding had the first radio installed in the White House.

1960 --- Congress opened an investigation into widespread charges of "payola" that disc jockeys were being paid to play certain records. The accused included deejays Alan Freed and Dick Clark. Clark came through the scandal unscathed, but Freed never worked in radio again.

1964 --- The Iraqi National Oil Company was incorporated in Baghdad on this day. Oil wealth would make Iraq an important player in the politics of the Middle East for the next three decades. The fear of losing access to Arab oil--a fear that marked all U.S. policy to the Middle East following the 1973 Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) embargo--drove the U.S. government to heavily support Iraq's war effort against Iran during the 1980s. However, America's friendly relationship with Iraq ended in 1990 with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, another oil wealthy Persian Gulf state friendly to the United States.

1968 --- Three college students died in a confrontation with highway patrolmen in Orangeburg, S.C., during a civil rights protest against a whites-only bowling alley.

1971 --- 1971 - The Nasdaq stock-market index debuted.

1983 --- Gunmen steal the champion Irish race horse Shergar from a stud farm owned by the Aga Khan in County Kildare, Ireland. The five-year-old thoroughbred stallion, named European horse of the year in 1981, was worth $13.5 million and commanded stud fees of approximately $100,000.On the night of the heist, armed men arrived at the home of one of Shergar’s grooms, James Fitzpatrick, and forced him to lead them to the horse and help load him onto a trailer. The kidnappers dropped Fitzpatrick on a remote road later that night and then demanded a ransom of more than $2 million for Shergar’s return.Negotiations with the kidnappers were short-lived and fruitless. Despite a highly publicized search by authorities, Shergar was never seen again and no ransom was paid. The case was never solved, although there were a variety of theories about the identity of the kidnappers. The most popular one held that the Irish Republican Army stole the animal in order to raise money for weapons, but ended up killing him in a panic because he was too difficult to handle. Former IRA member Sean O’Callaghan supported this theory in his book The Informer.

1989 --- A reedited version of the movie "Lawrence of Arabia" opened in New York City. Director David Lean revealed that due to an earlier editing mistake, for 20 years the camels had been moving in the wrong direction and nobody noticed.

1992 --- The single by R*S*F (Right Said Fred), I’m Too Sexy, was #1 in the U.S. It was a smash, staying at number one for three weeks, then dropping to number two for three more. “I’m too sexy for my car; too sexy for my car; Too sexy by far; And I’m too sexy for my hat; Too sexy for my hat; what do you think about that...”