1214 – The University of Oxford receives its charter.
1631 – The sack of Baltimore: the Irish village of Baltimore is attacked by Algerian pirates.
1782 – The U.S. Congress adopts the Great Seal of the United States.
1787 – Oliver Ellsworth moves at the Federal Convention to call the government the United States.
1840 – Samuel Morse receives the patent for the telegraph.
1863 – American Civil War: West Virginia is admitted as the 35th U.S. state.
1877 – Alexander Graham Bell installs the world’s first commercial telephone service in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
1893 – Lizzie Borden is acquitted of the murders of her father and stepmother.
1935 – Neal Knox, American activist and author (d. 2005) was born.
1942 – Brian Wilson, American singer-songwriter and producer (The Beach Boys) was born.
1942 – The Holocaust: Kazimierz Piechowski and three others, dressed as members of the SS-Totenkopfverbände, steal an SS staff car and escape from the Auschwitz concentration camp.
1943 – The Detroit Race Riot breaks out and continues for three more days.
1944 – World War II: The Battle of the Philippine Sea concludes with a decisive U.S. naval victory. The lopsided naval air battle is also known as the “Great Marianas Turkey Shoot”.
1945 – The United States Secretary of State approves the transfer of Wernher von Braun and his team of Nazi rocket scientists to America.
1947 – Bugsy Siegel, American mobster (b. 1906) died.
1963 – The so-called “red telephone” is established between the Soviet Union and the United States following the Cuban Missile Crisis.
1972 – Watergate scandal: An 18½-minute gap appears in the tape recording of the conversations between U.S. President Richard Nixon and his advisers regarding the recent arrests of his operatives while breaking into the Watergate complex.
2001 – Andrea Yates, in an attempt to save her young children from Satan, drowns all five of them in a bathtub in Houston, Texas.
2009 – During the Iranian election protests, the death of Neda Agha-Soltan is captured on video and spreads virally on the Internet, making it “probably the most widely witnessed death in human history”.
2011 – Ryan Dunn, American stuntman and actor (b. 1977) died.
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