451 – Battle of Chalons: Flavius Aetius’ battles Attila the Hun. After the battle, which was inconclusive, Attila retreats, causing the Romans to interpret it as a victory.
1248 – The University of Oxford receives its Royal charter.
1787 – Oliver Ellsworth moves at the Federal Convention to call the government the ‘United States’.
1789 – Deputies of the French Third Estate take the Tennis Court Oath.
1837 – Queen Victoria succeeds to the British throne.
1840 – Samuel Morse receives the patent for the telegraph.
1877 – Alexander Graham Bell installs the world’s first commercial telephone service in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
1900 – Boxer Rebellion: The Imperial Chinese Army begins a 55-day siege of the Legation Quarter in Beijing, China.
1900 – Baron Eduard Toll, leader of the Russian Polar Expedition of 1900, departs Saint Petersburg in Russia on the explorer ship Zarya, never to return.
1921 – Workers of Buckingham and Carnatic Mills in the city of Chennai, India, begin a four-month strike.
The Romans battle Attila’s Barbarian coalition at the Battle of Chalons, AD 451.
1942 – The Holocaust: Kazimierz Piechowski and three others, dressed as members of the SS-Totenkopfverbände, steal an SS staff car and escape from the Auschwitz concentration camp.
1943 – The Detroit race riot breaks out and continues for three more days.
1944 – The experimental MW 18014 V-2 rocket reaches an altitude of 176km, becoming the first man-made object to reach outer space.
1956 – A Venezuelan Super-Constellation crashes in the Atlantic Ocean off Asbury Park, New Jersey, killing 74 people.
1959 – A rare June hurricane strikes Canada’s Gulf of St. Lawrence, killing 35.
1963 – Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union and the United States sign an agreement to establish the so-called “red telephone” link between Washington and Moscow.
1972 – Watergate scandal: An 18½-minute gap appears in the tape recording of the conversations between U.S. President Richard Nixon and his advisers regarding the recent arrests of his operatives while breaking into the Watergate complex.
1975 – The film Jaws is released in the United States, becoming the highest-grossing film of that time and starting the trend of films known as “summer blockbusters”.
1979 – ABC News correspondent Bill Stewart is shot dead by a Nicaraguan soldier under the regime of Anastasio Somoza Debayle. The murder is caught on tape and sparks an international outcry against the regime.
2003 – The Wikimedia Foundation is founded in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Births
1924 – Fritz Koenig, German sculptor (Sphere at World Trade Center)
1949 – Lionel Richie, American singer (Commodores, Hello, Penny Lover)
Deaths
1920 – Dmitry Ivanovsky, Russian botanist, discovered the organisms that came to be known as viruses
Edited from various sources including historyorb.com, the NYTimes.com
Wikipedia and other internet searches