1148 – Louis VII of France lays siege to Damascus during the Second Crusade.
1411 – Battle of Harlaw, one of the bloodiest battles in Scotland, takes place.
1567 – Mary, Queen of Scots, is forced to abdicate and replaced by her 1-year-old son James VI.
1783 – The Kingdom of Georgia and the Russian Empire sign the Treaty of Georgievsk.
1814 – War of 1812: General Phineas Riall advances toward the Niagara River to halt Jacob Brown’s American invaders.
1823 – Slavery is abolished in Chile.
1823 – In Maracaibo, Venezuela the naval Battle of Lake Maracaibo takes place, where Admiral José Prudencio Padilla, defeats the Spanish Navy, thus culminating the independence for the Gran Colombia.
1866 – Reconstruction: Tennessee becomes the first U.S. state to be readmitted to the Union following the American Civil War.
1915 – The passenger ship S.S. Eastland capsizes while tied to a dock in the Chicago River. A total of 844 passengers and crew are killed in the largest loss of life disaster from a single shipwreck on the Great Lakes.
1922 – The draft of the British Mandate of Palestine was formally confirmed by the Council of the League of Nations; it came into effect on 26 September 1923.
1923 – The Treaty of Lausanne, settling the boundaries of modern Turkey, is signed in Switzerland by Greece, Bulgaria and other countries that fought in World War I.
1924 – Archeologist Themistoklis Sofoulis becomes Prime Minister of Greece.
1927 – The Menin Gate war memorial is unveiled at Ypres.
1929 – The Kellogg–Briand Pact, renouncing war as an instrument of foreign policy, goes into effect (it is first signed in Paris on August 27, 1928 by most leading world powers).
1929 – U.S. President Hoover proclaimed the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which renounced war as an instrument of foreign policy.
1943 – World War II: Operation Gomorrah begins: British and Canadian aeroplanes bomb Hamburg by night, and American planes by day. By the end of the operation in November, 9,000 tons of explosives will have killed more than 30,000 people and destroyed 280,000 buildings.
1948 – Soviet occupation forces in Germany blockaded West Berlin. The U.S.-British airlift began the following day.
1950 – Cape Canaveral Air Force Station begins operations with the launch of a Bumper rocket.
1959 – At the opening of the American National Exhibition in Moscow, U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev have a “Kitchen Debate”.
1963 – The ship Bluenose II was launched in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. The schooner is a major Canadian symbol.
1969 – The Apollo 11 astronauts splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean.
1974 – Watergate scandal: The United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled that President Richard Nixon did not have the authority to withhold subpoenaed White House tapes and they order him to surrender the tapes to the Watergate special prosecutor.
1977 – End of a four-day-long Libyan–Egyptian War.
1974 – The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that President Nixon had to turn over subpoenaed White House tape recordings to the Watergate special prosecutor.
1991 – Manmohan Singh presents his budget speech to the Indian Parliament which led to economic liberalisation in India
2001 – Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, the last Tsar of Bulgaria when he was a child, is sworn in as Prime Minister of Bulgaria, becoming the first monarch in history to regain political power through democratic election to a different office.
2001 – Bandaranaike Airport attack is carried out by 14 Tamil Tiger commandos, all died in this attack. They destroyed 11 Aircraft (mostly military) and damaged 15, there are no civilian casualties. This incident slowed down Sri Lankan economy.
2014 – Air Algérie Flight 5017 loses contact with air traffic controllers 50 minutes after takeoff. It was travelling between Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso and Algiers with 116 people on board. The wreckage is later found in Mali.
