380 – Theodosius I makes his adventus, or formal entry, into Constantinople.
1227 – Polish Prince Leszek the White is assassinated at an assembly of Piast dukes at Gąsawa.
1429 – Hundred Years’ War: Joan of Arc unsuccessfully besieges La Charité.
1542 – Battle of Solway Moss: An English army defeats a much larger Scottish force near the River Esk in Dumfries and Galloway.
1642 – Abel Tasman becomes the first European to discover the island Van Diemen’s Land (later renamed Tasmania).
1643 – Battle of Tuttlingen: Beiers army under Gen Mercy beats France
1835 – The Texas Provincial Government authorizes the creation of a horse-mounted police force called the Texas Rangers (which is now the Texas Ranger Division of the Texas Department of Public Safety).
1850 – Danish troops defeat a Schleswig-Holstein force in the town of Lottorf, Schleswig-Holstein.
1863 – American Civil War: Battle of Lookout Mountain: Near Chattanooga, Tennessee, Union forces under General Ulysses S. Grant capture Lookout Mountain and begin to break the Confederate siege of the city led by General Braxton Bragg.
1917 – In Milwaukee, nine members of the Milwaukee Police Department are killed by a bomb, the most deaths in a single event in U.S. police history until the September 11 attacks in 2001.
1922 – Nine Irish Republican Army members are executed by an Irish Free State firing squad. Among them is author Robert Erskine Childers, who had been arrested for illegally carrying a revolver.
1932 – In Washington, D.C., the FBI Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory (better known as the FBI Crime Lab) officially opens.
1935 – The Senegalese Socialist Party holds its second congress.
1940 – World War II: The First Slovak Republic becomes a signatory to the Tripartite Pact, officially joining the Axis powers.
1941 – World War II: The United States grants Lend-Lease to the Free French Forces.
1941 – Indian infantry attacks German tanks at Sidi Omar
1943 – World War II: The USS Liscome Bay is torpedoed near Tarawa and sinks, killing 650 men.
1944 – World War II: The 73rd Bombardment Wing launches the first attack on Tokyo from the Northern Mariana Islands.
1954 – Air Force One, 1st US Presidential airplane, christened
1962 – The West Berlin branch of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany forms a separate party, the Socialist Unity Party of West Berlin.
1963 – In the first live, televised murder, Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President John F. Kennedy, is murdered two days after the assassination, by Jack Ruby, a nightclub operator, in the basement of Dallas police department headquarters. Oswald was being led by two detectives to an armoured car to take him to the nearby county jail.
1965 – Joseph-Désiré Mobutu seizes power in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and becomes President; he rules the country (which he renames Zaire in 1971) for over 30 years, until being overthrown by rebels in 1997.
1966 – Bulgarian TABSO Flight 101 crashes near Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, killing all 82 people on board.
1969 – Apollo program: The Apollo 12 command module splashes down safely in the Pacific Ocean, ending the second manned mission to land on the Moon.
1971 – During a severe thunderstorm over Washington state, a hijacker calling himself Dan Cooper (aka D. B. Cooper) parachutes from a Northwest Orient Airlines plane with $200,000 in ransom money. He has never been found.
1972 – USSR performs underground nuclear test
1974 – Gerald Ford and Leonid Brezhnev sign the SALT-2 treaty to reduce each side’s number of nuclear weapons
1976 – The Çaldıran–Muradiye earthquake in eastern Turkey kills between 4,000 and 5,000 people.
1977 – France performs nuclear test at Muruora Island
1981 – 1st air-launched cruise missile tested
1992 – Boeing 734 crashes into mountain in China, kills 141
2012 – A fire at a clothing factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, kills at least 112 people.
2013 – Iran signs an interim agreement with the P5+1 countries, limiting its nuclear program in exchange for reduced sanctions.
2015 – A Russian Air ForceSukhoi Su-24 fighter jet is shot down by the Turkish Air Force over the Syria–Turkey border, killing one of the two pilots; a Russian marine is also killed during a subsequent rescue effort.
2015 – A terrorist attack on a hotel in Al-Arish, Egypt, kills at least seven people and injures 12 others.
2015 – An explosion on a bus carrying Tunisian Presidential Guard personnel in Tunisia’s capital Tunis leaves at least 14 people dead.