On Aug. 12, 1530, troops of the Holy Roman Empire restored Florence, Italy, to the Medici family.
In 1658 the first police force in America was established in Nieue Amsterdam (now New York City).
In 1851 Isaac Singer was granted a patent on a sewing machine with a rocking or double treadle.
In 1859 Katherine Lee Bates, who would write the poem "America the Beautiful," was born in Falmouth, Mass.
In 1867 President Andrew Johnson suspended Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.
In 1898 a peace protocol ending the Spanish-American War was signed. Also in 1898 Hawaii was annexed by the United States.
In 1914 Britain declared war on Austria-Hungary.
In 1941 French Marshal Henri Petain called on his countrymen to give full support to Nazi Germany in World War II.
In 1944 Navy Lt. Joseph Kennedy Jr., eldest son of Boston's Kennedy clan, was killed when his plane exploded off the coast of Belgium in World War II.
In 1960 the first balloon satellite, Echo 1, was launched by the United States from Cape Canaveral, Fla.
In 1962 the Soviet Union made space history by sending a cosmonaut into orbit while another was circling the Earth.
In 1970 President Richard Nixon signed a bill changing the 181-year-old Post Office Department to an independent agency.
In 1975 the Senate Intelligence Committee subpoenaed former President Nixon's tapes and documents to probe CIA involvement in Chile.
In 1981 trans-Atlantic air travel returned to normal when Canadian air traffic controllers ended a two-day boycott of flights to and from the United States. Also in 1981 Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Enders arrived in Managua, Nicaragua, to begin the Reagan administration's first high-level talks with the Sandinista government.
In 1982 the House passed a measure blocking the sale of oil and gas exploration leases in federal wilderness lands.
In 1985 a Japan Air Lines Boeing 747 crashed into a wooded mountain in central Japan, killing 520 people. (Four people survived the world's worst single-aircraft disaster.)
In 1993 President Clinton lifted a ban on rehiring air traffic controllers fired for going on strike in 1981.
In 1994, despite an appeal by President Clinton, major league baseball players began a strike, the union's eighth work stoppage since 1972 and its first midseason walkout since 1985. (For the first time since 1904, there were no playoffs or World Series.)