1097 – In the First Crusade, crusaders led by Godfrey of Bouillon, Bohemund of Taranto, and Raymond IV, Count of Toulouse, begin the Siege of Antioch.
1520 – Ferdinand Magellan discovers a strait now known as Strait of Magellan.
1797 – In Boston Harbor, the 44-gun, wooden-hulled, three-masted U.S. Navy frigate USS Constitution is launched.
1824 – Joseph Aspdin patents Portland cement.
1854 – Florence Nightingale with a staff of 38 nurses is sent to the Crimean War
1867 – The Medicine Lodge Treaty is signed by southern Great Plains Indian leaders. The treaty requires Native American Plains tribes to relocate to a reservation in western Oklahoma.
1940 – The first edition of the Ernest Hemingway novel For Whom the Bell Tollsis published.
1945 – Women are allowed to vote in France for the first time.
1959 – In New York City, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, opens to the public.
1959 – President Dwight D. Eisenhower transfers Wernher von Braun and other German scientists from the U. S. Army to NASA.
1966 – 116 children and 28 adults die as a coal waste heap slides and engulfs a school in Aberfan, South Wales
1983 – The metre is defined at the seventeenth General Conference on Weights and Measures as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.
2017 – Spanish government suspends Catalonia’s autonomy.
Births
1687 – Nicolaus I Bernoulli, Swiss mathematician and theorist (d. 1759)
1833 – Alfred Nobel, Swedish chemist and engineer, invented dynamite and founded the Nobel Prize (d. 1896)
1917 – Dizzy Gillespie, trumpet player, composer, and bandleader (d. 1993)
1927 – Howard Zieff, American director and photographer (d. 2009)
1980 – Kim Kardashian
Deaths
1969 – Jack Kerouac, novelist and poet (b. 1922)
1984 – François Truffaut, actor, director, producer, and screenwriter (b. 1932)
2012 – George McGovern, historian, lieutenant, and politician (b. 1922)
2014 – Ben Bradlee, editor, journalist and newspaper executive (Washington Post), dies at 93
