1776 – The Continental Congress officially names its new union of sovereign states the ‘United States’.
1791 – Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States, is named after President George Washington.
1947 – First case of a computer bug: A moth lodges in a relay of a Harvard Mark II computer at Harvard University.
1956 – Elvis Presley appears on The Ed Sullivan Show for the first time.
1965 – Hurricane Betsy makes its second landfall near New Orleans, leaving 76 dead and $1.42 billion ($10-12 billion in 2005 dollars) in damages, becoming the first hurricane to cause over $1 billion in unadjusted damage.
2015 – Elizabeth II became the longest reigning monarch of the United Kingdom.
Births
1711 – Thomas Hutchinson, American historian and politician, Governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay (d. 1780)
1899 – Bruno E. Jacob, American academic, founded the National Forensic League (d. 1979)
1928 – Sol LeWitt, American painter and sculptor (d. 2007)
1941 – Dennis Ritchie, American computer scientist, created the C programming language (d. 2011)
1951 – Dganit Greier, Israeli artist and New Yorker
Deaths
1087 – William the Conqueror, English King (b. 1028)
1976 – Mao Zedong, Chinese philosopher, academic, and politician, 1st Chairman of the Communist Party of China (b. 1893)
1978 – Jack L. Warner, Canadian-American production manager and producer, co-founded Warner Bros. (b. 1892)
2014 – Robert Young, Scottish-English guitarist (b. 1964)
