Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Argentina is elected as Pope Francis, becoming the first pope from the Americas and the first Jesuit to lead the Roman Catholic Church.

Russian Tsar Alexander II is assassinated in Saint Petersburg by revolutionaries, ending the reign of the reformist ruler known for emancipating the serfs.

Astronomer William Herschel discovers the planet Uranus, expanding humanity’s known boundaries of the solar system for the first time in modern astronomy.