• 1298 – An army under Albert of Austria defeated and killed Adolf of Nassua near Worms, Germany.
  • 1625 – The Spanish army took Breda, Spain, after nearly a year of siege.
  • 1644 – Lord Cromwell crushed the Royalists at the Battle of Marston Moor near York, England.
  • 1747 – Marshall Saxe led the French forces to victory over an Anglo-Dutch force under the Duke of Cumberland at the Battle of Lauffeld.
  • 1776 – Richard Henry Lee’s resolution that the American colonies “are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States” was adopted by the Continental Congress.
  • 1850 – Prussia agreed to pull out of Schlewig and Holstein, Germany.
  • 1858 – Czar Alexander II freed the serfs working on imperial lands.
  • 1881 – Charles J. Guiteau fatally wounded U.S. President James A. Garfield in Washington, DC.
  • 1890 – The U.S. Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act.
  • 1926 – The U.S. Congress established the Army Air Corps.
  • 1937 – American aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart disappeared in the Central Pacific during an attempt to fly around the world at the equator.
  • 1939 – At Mount Rushmore, Theodore Roosevelt’s face was dedicated.
  • 1944 – American bombers, as part of Operation Gardening, dropped land mines, leaflets and bombs on German-occupied Budapest.
  • 1947 – An object crashed near Roswell, NM. The U.S. Army Air Force insisted it was a weather balloon, but eyewitness accounts led to speculation that it might have been an alien spacecraft.
  • 1967 – The U.S. Marine Corps launched Operation Buffalo in response to the North Vietnamese Army’s efforts to seize the Marine base at Con Thien.
  • 1976 – The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the death penalty was not inherently cruel or unusual.
  • 1976 – North Vietnam and South Vietnam were reunited.
  • 1980 – U.S. President Jimmy Carter reinstated draft registration for males 18 years of age.
  • 1981 – Soyuz T-6 returned to Earth.
  • 1982 – Larry Walters (“Lawnchair Larry”) took flight in his homeade airship that consisted of a lawnchair with 45 helium-filled weather balloons attached to it. He stayed in flight for about an hour.
  • 1998 – Cable News Network (CNN) retracted a story that alleged that U.S. commandos had used nerve gas to kill American defectors during the Vietnam War.
  • 2002 – Steve Fossett becomes the first person to fly solo around the world nonstop in a balloon.
  • 2013 – The International Astronomical Union names Pluto’s fourth and fifth moons, Kerberos and Styx.