- 461 – Roman Emperor Majorian is beheaded near the river Iria in north-west Italy following his arrest and deposition by the magister militum Ricimer.[1]
- 626 – The Avar and Slav armies leave the siege of Constantinople.[2]
- 768 – Pope Stephen III is elected to office, and quickly seeks Frankish protection against the Lombard threat, since the Byzantine Empire is no longer able to help.[3]
- 936 – Coronation of King Otto I of Germany.[4]
- 1461 – The Ming dynasty Chinese military general Cao Qin stages a coup against the Tianshun Emperor.[5]
- 1479 – Battle of Guinegate, French troops of King Louis XI were defeated by the Burgundians led by Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg.[6]
- 1679 – The brigantine Le Griffon, commissioned by René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, is towed to the south-eastern end of the Niagara River, to become the first ship to sail the upper Great Lakes of North America.[7]
- 1714 – The Battle of Gangut: The first important victory of the Russian Navy.[8]
- 1782 – George Washington orders the creation of the Badge of Military Merit to honor soldiers wounded in battle.[9] It is later renamed to the more poetic Purple Heart.
- 1786 – The first federal Indian Reservation is created by the United States.[10]
- 1789 – The United States Department of War is established.[11]
- 1791 – American troops destroy the Miami town of Kenapacomaqua near the site of present-day Logansport, Indiana in the Northwest Indian War.[12]
- 1794 – U.S. President George Washington invokes the Militia Acts of 1792 to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania.[13]
- 1819 – Simón Bolívar triumphs over Spain in the Battle of Boyacá.[14]
- 1858 – The first Australian rules football match is played between Melbourne Grammar and Scotch College.[15]
- 1890 – Anna Månsdotter became the last woman to be executed in Sweden for the 1889 Yngsjö murder.[16]
- 1909 – Alice Huyler Ramsey and three friends become the first women to complete a transcontinental auto trip, taking 59 days to travel from New York, New York to San Francisco, California.[17]
- 1927 – The Peace Bridge opens between Fort Erie, Ontario and Buffalo, New York.[18]
- 1930 – The last confirmed lynching of blacks in the Northern United States occurs in Marion, Indiana; two men, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, are killed.[19]
- 1933 – The Kingdom of Iraq slaughters over 3,000 Assyrians in the village of Simele. This date is recognized as Martyrs Day or National Day of Mourning by the Assyrian community in memory of the Simele massacre.[20]
- 1942 – World War II: The Battle of Guadalcanal begins as the United States Marines initiate the first American offensive of the war with landings on Guadalcanal and Tulagi in the Solomon Islands.[21]
- 1944 – IBM dedicates the first program-controlled calculator, the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (known best as the Harvard Mark I).[22]
- 1946 – The government of the Soviet Union presented a note to its Turkish counterparts which refuted the latter’s sovereignty over the Turkish Straits, thus beginning the Turkish Straits crisis.[23]
- 1947 – Thor Heyerdahl‘s balsa wood raft, the Kon-Tiki, smashes into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands after a 101-day, 7,000 kilometres (4,300 mi) journey across the Pacific Ocean in an attempt to prove that pre-historic peoples could have traveled from South America.[24]
- 1947 – The Bombay Municipal Corporation formally takes over the Bombay Electric Supply and Transport (BEST).[25]
- 1959 – Explorer program: Explorer 6 launches from the Atlantic Missile Range in Cape Canaveral, Florida.[26]
- 1960 – Ivory Coast becomes independent from France.[27]
- 1962 – Canadian-born American pharmacologist Frances Oldham Kelsey awarded the U.S. President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service for her refusal to authorize thalidomide.[28]
- 1964 – Vietnam War: The U.S. Congress passes the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson broad war powers to deal with North Vietnamese attacks on American forces.[29][30]
- 1969 – Richard Nixon appoints Luis R. Bruce, a Mohawk–Oglala Sioux and co-founder of the National Congress of American Indians, as the new commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.[10]
- 1970 – California judge Harold Haley is taken hostage in his courtroom and killed during an effort to free George Jackson from police custody.[31]
- 1974 – Philippe Petit performs a high wire act between the twin towers of the World Trade Center 1,368 feet (417 m) in the air.[32]
- 1976 – Viking program: Viking 2 enters orbit around Mars.[33]
- 1978 – U.S. President Jimmy Carter declares a federal emergency at Love Canal due to toxic waste that had been disposed of negligently.[34]
- 1981 – The Washington Star ceases all operations after 128 years of publication.[35]
- 1985 – Takao Doi, Mamoru Mohri and Chiaki Mukai are chosen to be Japan’s first astronauts.[36]
- 1987 – Lynne Cox becomes the first person to swim from the United States to the Soviet Union, crossing the Bering Strait from Little Diomede Island in Alaska to Big Diomede in the Soviet Union.[37]
- 1989 – U.S. Congressman Mickey Leland (D-TX) and 15 others die in a plane crash in Ethiopia.[38]
- 1990 – First American soldiers arrive in Saudi Arabia as part of the Gulf War.[39]
- 1993 – Ada Deer, a Menominee activist, sworn in as the head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs.[10]
- 1997 – Space Shuttle Program: The Space Shuttle Discovery launches on STS-85 from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.[40]
- 1997 – Fine Air Flight 101 crashes after takeoff from Miami International Airport, killing five people.[41]
- 1998 – Bombings at United States embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya kill approximately 212 people.[42]
- 1999 – The Chechnya-based Islamic International Brigade invades neighboring Dagestan.[43]
- 2007 – At AT&T Park, Barry Bonds hits his 756th career home run to surpass Hank Aaron‘s 33-year-old record.[44]
- 2008 – The start of the Russo-Georgian War over the territory of South Ossetia.[45]
-Source: wikipedia
