1. In 1862, during the Civil War, Union forces under General Mitchell captured Huntsville, Alabama, cutting off a major Confederate supply line.

2. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed legislation authorizing the construction of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which straddles the border between Tennessee and North Carolina.

3. In 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his final speech, famously known as the "Mountaintop Speech," at the Mason Temple in Memphis. The following day, he was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel.

4. In 1982, country music legend Johnny Cash was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, recognizing him as one of the most influential and successful songwriters in the genre's history.

5. In 1998, NASA astronaut Andrew Allen, a native of Memphis, piloted the Space Shuttle Columbia on Mission STS-90, which conducted experiments in neuroscience and studied the effects of spaceflight on the human body.