1066 – Norman Conquest: Battle of Hastings: In England on Senlac Hill, seven miles from Hastings, the Norman forces of William the Conqueror defeat the English army and kill King Harold II of England.
1322 – Robert the Bruce of Scotland defeats King Edward II of England at Byland, forcing Edward to accept Scotland’s independence.
1586 – Mary, Queen of Scots, goes on trial for conspiracy against Elizabeth I of England.
1656 – Massachusetts enacts the first punitive legislation against the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). The marriage of church-and-state in Puritanism makes them regard the Quakers as spiritually apostate and politically subversive.
1773 – Just before the beginning of the American Revolutionary War, several of the British East India Company’s tea ships are set ablaze at the old seaport of Annapolis, Maryland.
1863 – American Civil War: Battle of Bristoe Station: Confederate troops under the command of General Robert E. Lee fail to drive the Union Army completely out of Virginia.
1880 – Mexican soldiers kill Victorio, one of the greatest Apache military strategists.
1884 – The American inventor, George Eastman, receives a U.S. Government patent on his new paper-strip photographic film.
1910 – The English aviator Claude Grahame-White lands his Farman Aircraft biplane on Executive Avenue near the White House in Washington,
1912 – While campaigning in Milwaukee, the former President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, is shot and mildly wounded by John Schrank, a mentally-disturbed saloon keeper. With the fresh wound in his chest, and the bullet still within it, Mr. Roosevelt still carries out his scheduled public speech.
1926 – The children’s book Winnie-the-Pooh, by A. A. Milne, is first published.
1933 – Nazi Germany withdraws from the League of Nations and World Disarmament Conference.
1943 – Prisoners at the Nazi German Sobibór extermination camp in Poland revolt against the Germans, killing eleven SS guards, and wounding many more. About 300 of the Sobibor Camp’s 600 prisoners escape, and about 50 of these survive the end of the war.
1944 – Linked to a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel is forced to commit suicide.
1947 – Captain Chuck Yeager of the United States Air Force flies a Bell X-1 rocket-powered experimental aircraft, the Glamorous Glennis, faster than the speed of sound at Mach 1.06 (700 miles per hour (1,100 km/h; 610 kn) over the high desert of Southern California and becomes the first pilot and the first airplane to do so in level flight.
1949 – Eleven leaders of the American Communist Party are convicted, after a nine-month trial in a Federal District Court, of conspiring to advocate the violent overthrow of the U.S. Federal Government.
1962 – The Cuban Missile Crisis begins: A U.S. Air Force U-2 reconnaissance plane and its pilot flies over the island of Cuba and takes photographs of Soviet SS-4 Sandal missiles being installed in Cuba.
1964 – Martin Luther King, Jr. received the Nobel Peace Prize for combating racial inequality through nonviolence.
1964 – Leonid Brezhnev becomes the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and thereby, along with his allies, such as Alexei Kosygin, the leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), ousting the former monolithic leader Nikita Khrushchev, and sending him into retirement as a nonperson in the USSR.
1967 – ThVietnam War: e folk singer Joan Baez is arrested concerning a physical blockade of the U.S. Army’s induction center in Oakland, California.
1968 – Vietnam War: Twenty-seven soldiers are arrested at the Presidio of San Francisco in California for their peaceful protest of stockade conditions and the Vietnam War.
1968 – Vietnam War: The United States Department of Defense announces that the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps will send about 24,000 soldiers and Marines back to Vietnam for involuntary second tours of duty in the combat zone there.
1968 – Apollo program: The first live TV broadcast by American astronauts in orbit performed by the Apollo 7 crew.
1968 – Jim Hines of the United States of America becomes the first man ever to break the so-called “ten-second barrier” in the 100-meter sprint in the Summer Olympic Games held in Mexico City with a time of 9.95 seconds.
1979 – The first Gay Rights March on Washington, D.C., the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, demands “an end to all social, economic, judicial, and legal oppression of lesbian and gay people”, and draws approximately 100,000 people.
1981 – Vice President Hosni Mubarak is elected as President of Egypt one week after the assassination of the President of Egypt, Anwar Sadat.
1984 – “Baby Fae” receives a heart transplant from a baboon.
1994 – The Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, The Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Rabin, and the Foreign Minister of Israel, Shimon Peres, receive the Nobel Peace Prize for their role in the establishment of the Oslo Accords and the framing of the future Palestinian Self Government.
1998 – Eric Rudolph is charged with six bombings including the 1996 Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta, Georgia.
Births
1641 – Joachim Tielke German instrument maker (d. 1719)
1644 – William Penn, English businessman, founded the Province of Pennsylvania
1890 – Dwight D. Eisenhower, American general and politician, 34th President of the United States (d. 1969)
1894 – e. e. cummings, American poet and playwright (d. 1962)
1906 – Hannah Arendt, German-American philosopher and theorist
1916 – C. Everett Koop, American admiral and surgeon, 13th United States Surgeon General (d. 2013)
1939 – Ralph Lauren, American fashion designer
Deaths
1066 – Harold Godwinson, English king (b. 1022)
1318 – Edward Bruce, Irish king (b. 1280)
1831 – Jean-Louis Pons, French astronomer and educator (b. 1761)
1977 – Bing Crosby, American singer-songwriter and actor (b. 1903)
1990 – Leonard Bernstein, American pianist, composer, and conductor