1215 - King John of England put his seal on the Magna Carta.
1381 - The English peasant revolt was crushed in London.
1389 - Ottoman Turks crushed Serbia in the Battle of Kosovo.
1607 - Colonists in North America completed James Fort in Jamestown, VA.
1667 - Jean-Baptiste Denys administered the first fully-documented human blood transfusion. He successfully transfused the blood of a sheep to a 15-year old boy.
1752 - Benjamin Franklin experimented by flying a kite during a
thunderstorm. The result was a little spark that showed the
relationship between lightning and electricity.
1775 - George Washington was appointed head of the Continental Army
by the Second Continental Congress.
1836 - Arkansas became the 25th U.S. state.
1844 - Charles Goodyear was granted a patent for the process that
1846 - The United States and Britain settled a boundary dispute
concerning the boundary between the U.S. and Canada, by
signing a treaty.
1864 - An order to establish a military burial ground was signed by
Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. The location later became
known as Arlington National Cemetery.
1866 - Prussia attacked Austria.
1877 - Henry O. Flipper became the first African American to
graduate from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
1898 - The U.S. House of representatives approved the annexation of Hawaii.
1909 - Benjamin Shibe patented the cork center baseball.
1911 - The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co. was incorporated in the state of New York. The company was later renamed International Business Machines (IBM) Corp.
1916 - U.S. President Woodrow Wilson signed a bill incorporating
the Boy Scouts of America.
1917 - Great Britain pledged the release of all the Irish captured
during the Easter Rebellion of 1916.
1919 - Captain John Alcock and Lt. Arthur W. Brown won $50,000 for
successfully completing the first, non-stop trans-Atlantic
1938 - Johnny Vandemeer (Cincinnati Reds) pitched his second straight no-hitter.
1940 - The French fortress of Verdun was captured by Germans.
1944 - American forces began their successful invasion of Saipan
during World War II.
1947 - The All-Indian Congress accepted a British plan for the
partition of India.
1948 - Soviet authorities announced that the Autobahn would be closed indefinitely "for repairs."
1958 - Greece severed military ties to Turkey because of the
1964 - The last French troops left Algeria.
1978 - King Hussein of Jordan married 26-year-old American Lisa
Halaby, who became Queen Noor.
1981 - The U.S. agreed to provide Pakistan with $3 billion in military and economic aid from October 1982 to October 1987.
1982 - In the capital city of Stanley, the Falklands war ended as Argentine troops surrendered to the British.
1983 - The U.S. Supreme Court reinforced its position on abortion
by striking down state and local restriction on abortions.
1986 - Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, reported that the
chief engineer of the Chernobyl nuclear plant was dismissed
for mishandling the incident at the plant.
1992 - It was ruled by the U.S. Supreme Court that the government could kidnap criminal suspects from foreign countries for prosecution.
1992 - U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle instructed a student to spell "potato" with an "e" on the end during a spelling bee. He had relied on a faulty flash card that had been written by the student's teacher.
1994 - Israel and the Vatican established full diplomatic relations.
1999 - South Korean naval forces sank a North Korean torpedo boat during an exchange in the disputed Yellow Sea.