• 1399 - Henry IV is proclaimed King of England.
• 1744 - France and Spain defeat the Kingdom of Sardinia at the Battle of Madonna dell'Olmo.
• 1781 - American War of Independence: The French defeat the British at the Battle of Chesapeake Capes.
• 1791 - The Magic Flute, the last opera composed by Mozart premiered at Theater an der Wien in Vienna, Austria.
• 1791 - The Constituent Assembly in Paris is dissolved; Parisians hail Maximilien Robespierre and Jérôme Pétion as incorruptible patriots.
• 1813 - Battle of Bárbula: Simón Bolívar defeats Santiago Bobadilla.
• 1860 - Britain's first tram service begins in Birkenhead, Merseyside.
• 1882 - The world's first commercial hydroelectric power plant (later known as Appleton Edison Light Company) begins operation on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin, United States.
• 1888 - Jack the Ripper kills his third and fourth victims, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes.
• 1895 - Madagascar becomes a French protectorate.
• 1901 - Hubert Cecil Booth patents the vacuum cleaner.
• 1903 - New Gresham's School officially opened by Field Marshal Sir Evelyn Wood.
• 1906 - Real Academia Galega, Galician language biggest linguistic authority starts working in Havana.
• 1927 - Babe Ruth becomes the first baseball player to hit 60 home runs in a season
• 1931 - Start of "Die Voortrekkers" youth movement for Afrikaners in Bloemfontein, South Africa.
• 1935 - The Hoover Dam, astride the border between the U.S. states of Arizona and Nevada, is dedicated.
• 1938 - At 2:00 am, Britain, France, Germany and Italy sign the Munich Agreement, allowing Germany to occupy the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia.
• 1938 - The League of Nations unanimously outlaws "intentional bombings of civilian populations".
• 1939 - Britain first evacuates citizens in anticipation of war.
• 1939 - General Władysław Sikorski becomes commander-in-chief of the Polish Government in exile.
• 1945 - Bourne End rail crash, Hertfordshire, England killed 43
• 1947 - The Islamic Republic of Pakistan joins the United Nations.
• 1947 - The World Series, featuring New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers, is televised for the first time.
• 1949 - The Berlin Airlift ends.
• 1954 - The U.S. Navy submarine USS Nautilus is commissioned as the world's first nuclear reactor powered vessel.
• 1955 - Film icon James Dean dies in a road accident, at age 24.
• 1962 - Mexican-American labor leader César Chávez founds the United Farm Workers.
• 1962 - James Meredith enters the University of Mississippi, defying segregation.
• 1965 - General Suharto rises to power after an alleged coup by the Communist Party of Indonesia. In response, Suharto and his army massacre over a million of Indonesian suspected as communists.
• 1966 - The British protectorate of Bechuanaland declares its independence, and becomes the Republic of Botswana. Seretse Khama takes office as the first President.
• 1967 - BBC Radio 1 is launched; the BBC's other national radio stations also adopt numeric names. Tony Blackburn presents the first show.
• 1970 - Jordan makes a deal with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) for the release of the remaining hostages from the Dawson's Field hijackings.
• 1972 - Roberto Clemente gets his 3000th base hit becoming just the 11th player to do so.
• 1975 - The J. Edgar Hoover Building is dedicatred by President Gerald Ford.
• 1975 - The Hughes (later McDonnell-Douglas, now Boeing) AH-64 Apache makes its first flight.
• 1977 - Due to US budget cuts, the Apollo program's ALSEP experiment packages left on the Moon are shut down.
• 1979 - The Hong Kong MTR commenced service with the opening of its Modified Initial System (aka. Kwun Tong Line).
• 1980 - Ethernet specifications published by Xerox working with Intel and Digital Equipment Corporation.
• 1982 - Cyanide-laced Tylenol kills six people in the Chicago area. Seven were killed in all. The incident is known as the Tylenol murders.
• 1986 - Mordechai Vanunu, who revealed details of Israel covert nuclear program to British media, was kidnapped in Rome, Italy.
• 1989 - Foreign Minister of West Germany Hans-Dietrich Genscher's speech from the balcony of the German embassy in Prague.
• 1990 - The Dalai Lama unveils the Canadian Tribute to Human Rights in Canada's capital city of Ottawa.
• 1991 - President Jean-Bertrand Aristide of Haiti is forced from office.
• 1993 - An earthquake hits India's Latur and Osmanabad district of Marathwada (Aurangabad division) in Maharashtra state leaving tens of thousands of people dead and many more homeless.
• 1999 - Japan's worst nuclear accident at a uranium reprocessing facility in Tōkai-mura, northeast of Tokyo.
• 2004 - The first images of a live giant squid in its natural habitat are taken 600 miles south of Tokyo.
• 2004 - The AIM-54 Phoenix, the primary missile for the F-14 Tomcat, retired from service. Almost two years later, the Tomcat retires.
• 2005 - The Parliament of Catalonia passes with 120 plus votes and 15 against, the Project of New Catalan Statute of Autonomy, proclaiming in its article 1, "Catalonia is a nation".
• 2005 - The controversial drawings of Muhammad are printed in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.
• 2006 - the National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia adopted the Constitutional Act that proclaimed the new Constitution of Serbia.

Births