285 – Execution of Saints Crispin and Crispinian during the reign of Diocletian, now the patron saints of leather workers and shoemakers.
1812 – War of 1812: The American frigate, USS United States, commanded by Stephen Decatur, captures the British frigate HMS Macedonian.
1927 – The Italian luxury liner SS Principessa Mafalda sinks off the coast of Brazil, killing 314. The SS Principessa Mafalda was an Italian transatlantic ocean liner built for the Navigazione Generale Italiana company.
1938 – The Archbishop of Dubuque, Francis J. L. Beckman, denounces swing music as “a degenerated musical system … turned loose to gnaw away at the moral fiber of young people”, warning that it leads down a “primrose path to hell”. His warning is widely ignored.
1944 – Heinrich Himmler orders a crackdown on the Edelweiss Pirates, a loosely organized youth culture in Nazi Germany that had assisted army deserters and others to hide from the Third Reich.
1962 – Cuban Missile Crisis: Adlai Stevenson shows photos at a meeting of the United Nations Security Council proving that Soviet missiles are installed in Cuba.
Births
1825 – Johann Strauss II, Austrian composer and educator (d. 1899)
1881 – Pablo Picasso, Spanish painter and sculptor (d. 1973)
1913 – Klaus Barbie, German captain (d. 1991)
Deaths
1557 – William Cavendish, English courtier and civil servant (b. 1505)
1916 – William Merritt Chase, American painter and educator (b. 1849)
1965 – Eduard Einstein, Swiss son of Albert Einstein (b. 1910)
1980 – Virgil Fox, American organist and educator (b. 1912)
1991 – Bill Graham, German-American concert promoter (b. 1931)
1995 – Bobby Riggs, American tennis player (b. 1918)