1757 – Admiral Sir John Byng is executed by firing squad aboard HMS Monarch for breach of the Articles of War.
1780 – American Revolutionary War: Spanish forces capture Fort Charlotte in Mobile, Alabama, the last British frontier post capable of threatening New Orleans in Spanish Louisiana.
1883 – Karl Marx, German philosopher and theorist (b. 1818) died.
1899 – K. C. Irving, Canadian businessman, founded Irving Oil (d. 1992) was born.
1900 – The Gold Standard Act is ratified, placing United States currency on the gold standard.
1903 – The Hay–Herrán Treaty, granting the United States the right to build the Panama Canal, is ratified by the United States Senate. The Colombian Senate would later reject the treaty.
1942 – Orvan Hess and John Bumstead became the first in the United States successfully to treat a patient, Anne Miller, using penicillin.
1943 – World War II: The Kraków Ghetto is “liquidated”.
1945 – World War II: The R.A.F.’s first operational use of the Grand Slam bomb, Bielefeld, Germany.
1951 – Korean War: For the second time, United Nations troops recapture Seoul.
1964 – A jury in Dallas finds Jack Ruby guilty of killing Lee Harvey Oswald, the assumed assassin of John F. Kennedy.
1967 – The body of U.S. President John F. Kennedy is moved to a permanent burial place at Arlington National Cemetery.
1984 – Gerry Adams, head of Sinn Féin, is seriously wounded in an assassination attempt in central Belfast.
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