1097 – First Crusade: Crusaders led by Godfrey of Bouillon, Bohemund of Taranto, and Raymond IV, Count of Toulouse, begin the Siege of Antioch.
1520 – Ferdinand Magellan discovers a strait now known as Strait of Magellan.
1600 – Tokugawa Ieyasu defeats the leaders of rival Japanese clans in the Battle of Sekigahara, which marks the beginning of the Tokugawa shogunate.
1774 – First display of the word “Liberty” on a flag, raised by colonists in Taunton, Massachusetts in defiance of British rule in Colonial America.
Attributed to Michel Felice Corné (1752-1845)
1797 – In Boston Harbor, the 44-gun United States Navy frigate USS Constitution is launched.USS Constitution is a wooden-hulled, three-masted heavy frigate of the United States Navy, named by President George Washington after the Constitution of the United States of America
1824 – Joseph Aspdin patents Portland cement.
1867 – The Medicine Lodge Treaty is signed by southern Great Plains Indian leaders. The treaty requires Native American Plains tribes to relocate to a reservation in western Oklahoma.
1921 – President Warren G. Harding delivers the first speech by a sitting U.S. President against lynching in the deep South.
1940 – The first edition of the Ernest Hemingway novel For Whom the Bell Tolls is published.
1944 – World War II: The first kamikaze attack. A Japanese fighter plane carrying a 200-kilogram (440 lb) bomb attacks HMAS Australia off Leyte Island, as the Battle of Leyte Gulf began.
1945 – Women’s suffrage: Women are allowed to vote in France for the first time.
1959 – In New York City, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, opens to the public.
Solomon Guggenheim came from a wealthy mining family and had been collecting works of the old masters until 1926 when he met artist Hilla von Rebay and was introduced to European avant-garde art and Post-Impressionists. He then changed his collecting strategy, turning to abstract and non-objective art, with works by Kandinsky, Klee and others.
He turned his Plaza Hotel apartment into a gallery and as his collection grew, he established the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1937 to foster the appreciation of modern art. The Museum was established in 1939 and 20 years later moved to its current location in a landmark building designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
1959 – President Dwight D. Eisenhower signs an executive order transferring Wernher von Braun and other German scientists from the United States Army to NASA.
1983 – The metre is defined at the seventeenth General Conference on Weights and Measures as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.
1986 – In Lebanon, pro-Iran kidnappers claim to have abducted American writer Edward Tracy (he is released in August 1991).
1994 – North Korea nuclear weapons program: North Korea and the United States sign an Agreed Framework that requires North Korea to stop its nuclear weapons program and agree to inspections.
Births
1687 – Nicolaus I Bernoulli, Swiss mathematician and theorist (d. 1759)
1833 – Alfred Nobel, Swedish chemist and engineer, invented dynamite and founded the Nobel Prize (d. 1896)
1917 – Dizzy Gillespie, American trumpet player, composer, and bandleader (d. 1993)
1927 – Howard Zieff, American director and photographer (d. 2009)
Deaths
1969 – Jack Kerouac, American novelist and poet (b. 1922)
1984 – François Truffaut, French actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1932)
2012 – George McGovern, American historian, lieutenant, and politician