632 – Muhammad, Islamic prophet, dies in Medina.
793 – Vikings raid the abbey at Lindisfarne in Northumbria, commonly accepted as the beginning of Norse activity in the British Isles.
1042 – Edward the Confessor becomes King of England, one of the last Anglo-Saxon kings of England.
1783 – Laki, a volcano in Iceland, begins an eight-month eruption which kills over 9,000 people and starts a seven-year famine.
1789 – James Madison introduces twelve proposed amendments to the United States Constitution in Congress.
1794 – Robespierre inaugurates the French Revolution’s new state religion, the Cult of the Supreme Being, with large organized festivals all across France.
1856 – A group of 194 Pitcairn Islanders, descendants of the mutineers of HMS Bounty, arrives at Norfolk Island, commencing the Third Settlement of the Island.
1861 – American Civil War: Tennessee secedes from the Union.
1867 – Coronation of Franz Joseph as King of Hungary following the Austro-Hungarian compromise (Ausgleich).
1887 – Herman Hollerith applies for US patent #395,781 for the ‘Art of Compiling Statistics’, which was his punched card calculator.
1906 – Theodore Roosevelt signs the Antiquities Act into law, authorizing the President to restrict the use of certain parcels of public land with historical or conservation value.
1912 – Carl Laemmle incorporates Universal Pictures.
1918 – A solar eclipse is observed at Baker City, Oregon by scientists and an artist hired by the United States Navy.
The punched card calculator which Herman Hollerith patented in 1887. His company would later become one of the four companies that merged to form IBM.
1929 – Margaret Bondfield is appointed Minister of Labour. She is the first woman appointed to the Cabinet of the United Kingdom.
1949 – Helen Keller, Dorothy Parker, Danny Kaye, Fredric March, John Garfield, Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson are named in an FBI report as Communist Party members.
1949 – George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is published.
1953 – The United States Supreme Court rules that restaurants in Washington, D.C. cannot refuse to serve black patrons.
1959 – The USS Barbero and United States Postal Service attempt the delivery of mail via Missile Mail.
1972 – Vietnam War: Nine-year-old Phan Thị Kim Phúc is burned by napalm, an event captured by Associated Press photographer Nick Ut moments later while the young girl is seen running down a road, in what would become an iconic, Pulitzer Prize-winning photo.
1984 – Homosexuality is declared legal in the Australian state of New South Wales.
1987 – New Zealand’s Labour government establishes a national nuclear-free zone under the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone, Disarmament, and Arms Control Act 1987.
1992 – The first World Ocean Day is celebrated, coinciding with the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
2004 – The first Venus Transit in well over a century takes place, the previous one being in 1882.
2008 – At least 37 miners go missing after an explosion in an Ukrainian coal mine causes it to collapse.
2009 – Two American journalists are found guilty of illegally entering North Korea and sentenced to 12 years of penal labour.
Births
1867 – Frank Lloyd Wright, American architect recognized as “the greatest American architect of all time”
1916 – Francis Crick, English molecular biologist who co-discovered DNA’s structure
1925 – Barbara Bush, US First Lady (1989-93), born in NYC
1940 – Nancy Sinatra, singer (Boots are Made for Walkin’) and daughter of Frank Sinatra
Deaths
1809 – Thomas Paine, English/American writer (Age of Reason, Common Sense)
1845 – Andrew Jackson, 7th US President (1828-37)
Edited from various sources including historyorb.com, the NYTimes.com
Wikipedia and other internet searches