480 BC – Battle of Salamis: The Greek fleet under Themistocles defeats the Persian fleet under Xerxes I.
904 – The warlord Zhu Quanzhong kills Emperor Zhaozong, the penultimate emperor of the Tang dynasty, after seizing control of the imperial government.
1236 – The Lithuanians and Semigallians defeat the Livonian Brothers of the Sword in the Battle of Saule.
1499 – Treaty of Basel concludes the Swabian War.
1586 – Battle of Zutphen: Spanish victory over the English and Dutch.
1711 – The Tuscarora War begins in present-day North Carolina.
1761 – George III and Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz are crowned King and Queen, respectively, of the Kingdom of Great Britain.
1789 – Battle of Rymnik establishes Alexander Suvorov as a pre-eminent Russian military commander after his allied army defeat superior Ottoman Empire forces.
1792 – Primidi Vendémiaire of year one of the French Republican Calendar as the French First Republic comes into being.
1823 – Joseph Smith states he found the Golden plates on this date after being directed by God through the Angel Moroni to the place where they were buried.
1857 – The Russian warship Lefort capsizes and sinks during a storm in the Gulf of Finland, killing all 826 aboard.
1862 – Slavery in the United States: A preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation is released.
1866 – Battle of Curupayty in the Paraguayan War.
1885 – Lord Randolph Churchill makes a speech in Ulster in opposition to Home Rule.
1888 – The first issue of National Geographic Magazine is published.
1896 – Queen Victoria surpasses her grandfather King George III as the longest reigning monarch in British history.
1908 – The Bulgarian Declaration of Independence is proclaimed.
1910 – The Duke of York’s Picture House opens in Brighton, now the oldest continually operating cinema in Britain.
1914 – German submarine SM U-9 torpedoes and sinks the British cruisers HMS Aboukir, Hogue and Cressy on the Broad Fourteens off the Dutch coast with the loss of over 1,400 men.
1937 – Spanish Civil War: Peña Blanca is taken, ending the Battle of El Mazuco.
1939 – Joint victory parade of Wehrmacht and Red Army in Brest-Litovsk at the end of the Invasion of Poland.
1941 – World War II: On Jewish New Year Day, the German SS murder 6,000 Jews in Vinnytsia, Ukraine. Those are the survivors of the previous killings that took place a few days earlier in which about 24,000 Jews were executed.
1965 – The Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 (also known as the Second Kashmir War) between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, ends after the UN calls for a ceasefire.
1979 – A bright flash, resembling the detonation of a nuclear weapon, is observed near the Prince Edward Islands. Its cause is never determined.
1980 – Iraq invades Iran.
1991 – The Dead Sea Scrolls are made available to the public for the first time by the Huntington Library.
1993 – A Transair Georgian Airlines Tu-154 is shot down by a missile in Sukhumi, Georgia.
1995 – An E-3B AWACS crashes outside Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska after multiple bird strikes to two of the four engines soon after takeoff; all 24 on board are killed.
1995 – Nagerkovil school bombing, is carried out by the Sri Lanka Air Force in which at least 34 die, most of them ethnic Tamil schoolchildren.
2013 – At least 75 people are killed in a suicide bombing at a Christian church in Peshawar, Pakistan.