972 - Battle of Cedynia, the first documented victory of Polish forces, takes place.
1128 - Battle of São Mamede, near Guimarães:Portuguese forces led by Alfonso I defeat his mother D. Teresa and D. Fernão Peres de Trava. After this battle, the future king calls himself "Prince of Portugal", the first step towards "official independence" in 1139, after the Battle of Ourique.
1314 - First War of Scottish Independence: The Battle of Bannockburn concludes with a decisive victory of the Scottish forces led by Robert the Bruce. Scotland regains its independence in the aftermath of this battle.
1340 - Hundred Years' War: Battle of Sluys: The French fleet is almost destroyed by the English Fleet commanded in person by Edward III of England.
1374 - A sudden outbreak of St. John's Dance causes people in the streets of Aachen, Germany, to experience hallucinations and begin to jump and twitch uncontrollably until they collapse from exhaustion.
1717 - The Premier Grand Lodge of England, the first Masonic Grand Lodge in the world (now the [United Grand Lodge of England]]), is founded in London, England.
1748 - The Kingswood School is opened by John Wesley and his brother Charles Wesley in Bristol. The school later moved to Bath.
1793 - The first republican constitution in France is adopted.
1947 - Kenneth Arnold makes the first widely reported UFO sighting near Mount Rainier, Washington.
1948 - Start of the Berlin Blockade. The Soviet Union makes overland travel between the West with West Berlin impossible.
1949 - The first Television Western, Hopalong Cassidy, is aired on NBC starring William Boyd.
1957 - The U.S. Supreme Court rules that obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment in Roth v. United States.
1963 - Zanzibar is granted internal self-government by the United Kingdom.
1975 - An Eastern Air Lines Boeing 727 crashes at John F. Kennedy Airport, New York. 113 people die.
1981 - The Humber Bridge is opened to traffic, connecting Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. It would be the world's longest single-span suspension bridge for 17 years.
1982 - British Airways Flight 9, sometimes referred to as the Jakarta incident, flew into a cloud of volcanic ash thrown up by the eruption of Mount Galunggung, resulting in the failure of all four engines.
1983 - Space Shuttle program: STS-7: Sally Ride, the first female American astronaut, returns to earth.
1985 - STS-51-G Space Shuttle Discovery completed its mission, best remembered for having Sultan bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the first Arab and first Muslim in space, as a Payload Specialist.
1993 - Yale computer science professor Dr. David Gelernter loses the sight in one eye, the hearing in one ear, and part of his right hand after receiving a mailbomb from the Unabomber.
1994 - A United States Air Force B-52 aircraft crashes at Fairchild Air Force Base, killing all four members of its crew.
1995 - South Africa defeats New Zealand in the 1995 Rugby World Cup. The 1995 World cup is the first major sporting event in South Africa after Apartheid.
2002 - The Igandu train disaster in Tanzania kills 281, the worst train accident in African history.
2004 - In New York, capital punishment is declared unconstitutional.
2007 - The Angora Fire starts near South Lake Tahoe, California destroying 200+ structures in its first 48 hours.
2012 - Shenzhou 9, a Chinese spacecraft carrying three Chinese astronauts, including the first-ever female one, docked manually with an orbiting module Tiangong 1, first time as the country, making them as the third country, after the United States and Russia, to successfully perform the mission.
2012 - Lonesome George, the last known individual of the Pinta Island Tortoise subspecies, dies at a Galapagos National Park, thus making the subspecies extinct.
