1607 – 100 English settlers disembark in Jamestown, the first English colony in America
1626 – Peter Minuit buys Manhattan
1689 – The English Parliament passes the Act of Toleration protecting Protestants. Roman Catholics are intentionally excluded.
1798 – The Irish Rebellion of 1798 led by the United Irishmen against British rule begins.
1813 – South American independence leader Simón Bolívar enters Mérida, leading the invasion of Venezuela, and is proclaimed El Libertador
1830 – “Mary Had a Little Lamb” by Sarah Josepha Hale is published.
1832 – The First Kingdom of Greece is declared in the London Conference.
1844 – Samuel Morse sends the message “What hath God wrought” (a biblical quotation, Numbers 23:23) from the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the United States Capitol to his assistant, Alfred Vail, in Baltimore, Maryland, to inaugurate the first telegraph line.
1856 – John Brown and his men kill five slavery supporters at Pottawatomie Creek, Kansas. Two years earlier, the Kansas-Nebraska Act had been passed, allowing settlers to use the principle of popular sovereignty and vote to determine whether slavery would be allowed in each state. Anti and pro-slavery supporters flooded the territory, and violence soon erupted in “Bleeding Kansas”.
1883 – The Brooklyn Bridge is opened to traffic after 14 years of construction.
1915 – World War I: Italy declares war on Austria-Hungary, joining the conflict on the side of the Allies.
1935 – The first night game in Major League Baseball history is played in Cincinnati, Ohio, with the Cincinnati Reds beating the Philadelphia Phillies 2-1 at Crosley Field.
1940 – Igor Sikorsky performs the first successful single-rotor helicopter flight.
1940 – Acting on the orders of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, NKVD agent Iosif Grigulevich orchestrates an unsuccessful assassination attempt on exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky in Coyoacán, Mexico.
1961 – American civil rights movement: Freedom Riders are arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, for “disturbing the peace” after disembarking from their bus.
1962 – Project Mercury: American astronaut Scott Carpenter orbits the Earth three times in the Aurora 7 space capsule.
1967 – Egypt imposes a blockade and siege of the Red Sea coast of Israel.
1976 – The Judgment of Paris takes place in France, launching California as a worldwide force in the production of quality wine.
1988 – Section 28 of the United Kingdom’s Local Government Act 1988, a controversial amendment stating that a local authority cannot intentionally promote homosexuality, is enacted. The amendment stated that local authority should not “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship”. Because it did not create a criminal offense, no one was ever prosecuted under the provision, but many LGBT student support groups in schools and colleges were closed out of fear that they could breach the Act.
1994 – Four men convicted of bombing the World Trade Center in 1993 are each sentenced to 240 years in prison.
2001 – Mountaineering: Temba Tsheri, a 16-year-old Sherpa, becomes the youngest person to climb to the top of Mount Everest.
Births
15 BC – Germanicus, Roman general (d. 19)
1686 – Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, Polish-German physicist and engineer, developed the Fahrenheit scale (d. 1736)
1819 – Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom (d. 1901)
1879 – H. B. Reese, American candy maker, created Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups (d. 1956)
1911 – Barbara West, English survivor of the Sinking of the RMS Titanic (d. 2007)
1941 – Bob Dylan, singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer and Nobel Prize winner
1942 – Lázár Lovász, Hungarian hammer thrower
Deaths
1543 – Nicolaus Copernicus, Polish mathematician and astronomer (b. 1473)
1959 – John Foster Dulles, 52nd United States Secretary of State (b. 1888)
1974 – Duke Ellington, American pianist and composer (b. 1899)
Edited from various sources including historyorb.com, the NYTimes.com Wikipedia and other internet searches