1502 – Christopher Columbus lands at Honduras on his fourth, and final, voyage.
1635 – Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II of Austria declares war on France.
1679 – New Hampshire becomes a county of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
1793 – The first cornerstone of the Capitol building is laid by George Washington.
1812 – The 1812 Fire of Moscow dies down after destroying more than three-quarters of the city.
1837 – Tiffany and Co. is founded by Charles Lewis Tiffany and Teddy Young in New York City.
1851 – First publication of The New-York Daily Times, which later becomes The New York Times.
1870 – Old Faithful Geyser is observed and named by Henry D. Washburn during the Washburn-Langford-Doane Expedition to Yellowstone.
1906 – A typhoon with tsunami kills an estimated 10,000 people in Hong Kong.
1919 – The Netherlands gives women the right to vote.
1927 – The Columbia Broadcasting System goes on the air.
1931 – The Mukden Incident, or also known as the Manchurian Incident, was a staged event engineered by Japanese military personnel as a pretext for the Japanese invasion in 1931of northeastern China, known as Manchuria.
A small amount of dynamite was exploded close to a railway line owned by Japan’s South Manchuria Railway near Mukden. The explosion was so weak that it failed to do much damage and a train passed over it minutes later, but it gave the Japanese an excuse to accuse Chinese dissidents of the act and responded with a full invasion that led to the occupation of Manchuria. The ruse of war was soon exposed by The Lytton Report of 1932 and led to Japan’s diplomatic isolation and its withdrawal from the League of Nations.
1934 – The USSR is admitted to the League of Nations.
1959 – Vanguard 3 is launched into Earth orbit.
1961 – U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld dies in a plane crash while attempting to negotiate peace in the war-torn Katanga region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
1974 – Hurricane Fifi strikes Honduras with 110 mph winds, killing 5,000 people.
1977 – Voyager I takes first photograph of the Earth and the Moon together.
1997 – United States media magnate Ted Turner donates US$1 billion to the United Nations.
2001 – First mailing of anthrax letters from Trenton, New Jersey in the 2001 anthrax attacks.
Births
AD 53 – Trajan, Roman emperor (d. 117)
1905 – Greta Garbo, Swedish-American actress (d. 1990)
1933 – Mark di Suvero, Italian-American sculptor
1961 – James Gandolfini, American actor and producer (d. 2013)
1971 – Lance Armstrong, cyclist and activist, caught in a lie.
Deaths
1953 – Charles de Tornaco, Belgian race car driver (b. 1927)
1964 – Seán O’Casey, Irish dramatist and memoirist (b. 1880)
1970 – Jimi Hendrix, singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer (b. 1942)
Click here to watch his performance at Woodstock in the summer of 1969.
