781 BC – Oldest Chinese recording of a solar eclipse
1411 – King Charles VI granted a monopoly for the ripening of Roquefort cheese to the people of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon as they had been doing for centuries.
1760 – Great Upheaval: New England planters arrive to claim land in Nova Scotia, Canada, taken from the Acadians.
1792 – Captain George Vancouver claims Puget Sound for the Kingdom of Great Britain.
1794 – Congress passes Neutrality Act, bans Americans from serving in armed forces of foreign powers (What IS NATO again?)
1812 – Following Louisiana’s admittance as a U.S. state, the Louisiana Territory is renamed the Missouri Territory.
1825 – General Lafayette, a French officer in the American Revolutionary War, speaks at what would become Lafayette Square, Buffalo, during his visit to the United States.
1845 – Mexican-US war starts
1855 – Major Henry C. Wayne departs New York aboard the USS Supply to procure camels to establish the U.S. Camel Corps.
1896 – Henry Ford completes the Ford Quadricycle, his first gasoline-powered automobile, and gives it a successful test run.
1912 – Massachusetts becomes the first state of the United States to set a minimum wage.
1913 – Emily Davison, a suffragette, runs out in front of King George V’s horse, Anmer, at the Epsom Derby. She is trampled, never regains consciousness and dies a few days later.
1919 – Women’s rights: The U.S. Congress approves the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees suffrage to women, and sends it to the U.S. states for ratification.
1928 – The President of the Republic of China, Zhang Zuolin, is assassinated by Japanese agents.
1939 – Holocaust: The MS St. Louis, a ship carrying 963 Jewish refugees, is denied permission to land in Florida, in the United States, after already being turned away from Cuba. Forced to return to Europe, more than 200 of its passengers later die in Nazi concentration camps.
1940 – World War II: The Dunkirk evacuation ends – British forces complete evacuation of 338,000 troops from Dunkirk in France. To rally the morale of the country, Winston Churchill delivers his famous “We shall fight on the beaches” speech.
1942 – Capitol Record Co opens for business
1943 – Race riots in LA
1944 – World War II: A hunter-killer group of the United States Navy captures the German submarine U-505 – the first time a U.S. Navy vessel had captured an enemy vessel at sea since the 19th century.
1944 – World War II: Rome falls to the Allies, the first Axis capital to fall.
1957 – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous Power of Nonviolence speech at the University of California, Berkeley.
1961 – In the Vienna summit, the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev sparks the Berlin Crisis by threatening to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany and ending American, British and French access to East Berlin.
1972 – Angela Davis, black activist, acquitted of killing a white guard
1974 – NFL grants franchise to Seattle Seahawks
1975 – The Governor of California Jerry Brown signs the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act into law, the first law in the U.S. giving farmworkers collective bargaining rights.
1975 – Russell Brand, British comedian and television personality Born
1975 – Angelina Jolie, Los Angeles, California, American actress Birthed
1977 – Violence during Puerto Rican Day in Chicago kills 2
1982 – Israel attacks targets in south Lebanon
1986 – Jonathan Pollard pleads guilty to espionage for selling top secret United States military intelligence to Israel.
1989 – The Tiananmen Square protests are violently ended in Beijing by the People’s Liberation Army, with at least 241 dead.
1990 – Dr Jack Kevorkian assisted an Oregon woman to commit suicide, beginning a national debate over the right to die
1998 – Terry Nichols is sentenced to life in prison for his role in the Oklahoma City bombing.
2004 – Marvin Heemeyer’s eventually suicidal protest rampage with an improvised bulletproofed bulldozer destroys 13 buildings in Granby, Colorado, including the town hall.
2012 – US drone attack kills 15 militants in Pakistan, including high ranking al-Qaeda official, Abu Yahya al-Libi
2012 – Car bomb kills 26 and injures 190 people in central Baghdad, Iraq
2012 – Japan’s stock market plummets to record lows with the S&P/TOPIX 150 reaching its lowest level since 1983