939 - The Major Occultation, or Ghaybat el-Kubra of Muhammad al-Mahdi
1099 - First Crusade: 15,000 starving Christian soldiers march in religious procession around Jerusalem as its Muslim defenders look on.
1283 - War of the Sicilian Vespers: Battle of Malta
1497 - Vasco da Gama sets sail on first direct European voyage to India.
1579 - Our Lady of Kazan, a holy icon of the Russian Orthodox Church, was discovered underground in the city of Kazan, Tatarstan.
1663 - Charles II of England grants John Clarke a Royal Charter to Rhode Island.
1680 - The first confirmed tornado in America kills a servant at Cambridge, Massachusetts.
1709 - Great Northern War: Battle of Poltava: Peter I of Russia defeats Charles XII of Sweden at Poltava thus effectively ending Sweden's role as a major power in Europe.
1876 - White supremacists kill five Black Republicans in Hamburg, SC.
1889 - The first issue of the Wall Street Journal is published.
1892 - St. John's, Newfoundland is devastated in the Great Fire of 1892.
1896 - William Jennings Bryan delivers his Cross of Gold speech advocating bimetalism at the 1896 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
1898 - The shooting death of crime boss Soapy Smith releases Skagway, Alaska from his iron grip.
1932 - The Dow Jones Industrial Average reaches its lowest level of the Great Depression, bottoming out at 41.22.
1947 - Reports are broadcast that a UFO has crashed landed in Roswell, New Mexico.
1960 - Francis Gary Powers is charged with espionage resulting from his flight over the Soviet Union.
1962 - Ne Win sieged and dynamited the Ragoon University Student Union building to crash the Student Movement.
1969 - IBM CICS is made generally available for the 360 mainframe computer.
1970 - Richard Nixon delivers special congressional message enunciating Native American Self-Determination as official US Indian policy, leading to the Indian Self-Determination Act.
1977 - The ashes of Ahn Eak-tai, a Korean conductor and the composer of the national anthem Aegukga, are transferred from the island of Majorca to the Korean National Cemetery.
1982 - Assassination attempt against former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in Dujail.
1982 - Senegalese Trotskyist political party LCT is legally recognized.
1992 - Conference for Security and Co-operation in Europe creates the office of High Commissioner on National Minorities.
1997 - NATO invites the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland to join the alliance in 1999.
1999 - Allen Lee Davis is executed by electrocution by the state of Florida, the last use of the electric chair for capital punishment in Florida.
2003 - Sudan Airways Flight 39, with 116 people on board, crashes in Sudan; the only survivor is a two-year-old boy who subsequently dies as a result of his injuries.
2010 - The first 24-hour flight by a solar powered plane is completed by the Solar Impulse.
