1275 – Traditional founding of the city of Amsterdam.
1524 – Italian Wars: The French troops lay siege to Pavia.
1553 – Michael Servetus was a Spanish theologian, physician, cartographer and was the first to correctly describe the function of pulmonary circulation.He participated in the Protestant Reformation and was condemned by Catholics and Protestants and arrested in Geneva and burnt at the stake as a heretic by order of the city’s Protestant governing council.
1838 – Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs issues the Extermination Order,which orders all Mormons to leave the state or be exterminated. Claiming that Latter-day Saints had committed open and avowed defiance of the law after the Battle of Crooked River, a clash between Latter-day Saints and the Missouri State Guard, Governor Boggs directed that “the Mormons must be treated as enemies, and must be exterminated or driven from the State if necessary for the public peace—their outrages are beyond all description”.
1904 – The first underground New York City Subway line opens, almost 36 years after the opening of the first elevated line in New York City, The fare was five cents and on the first day the trains carried over 150,000 passengers. City Hall subway station, was designed to be the showpiece of the new subway system with its elegant platform and mezzanine featured Guastavino tile, skylights, colored glass tilework and brass chandeliers.
1914 – The British lose their first battleship of World War I: The British super-dreadnought battleship HMS Audacious (23,400 tons) is sunk off Tory Island, north-west of Ireland, by a minefield laid by the armed German merchant-cruiser Berlin. The loss was kept an official secret in Britain until 14 November 1918 (three days after the end of the war). The sinking was witnessed and photographed by passengers on RMS Olympic sister ship of RMS Titanic.
1936 – Mrs Wallis Simpson files for divorce which would eventually allow her to marry King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom, thus forcing his abdication from the throne.
1961 – NASA tests the first Saturn I rocket in Mission Saturn-Apollo 1.
1962 – Major Rudolf Anderson of the United States Air Force becomes the only direct human casualty of the Cuban Missile Crisis when his U-2 reconnaissance airplane is shot down in Cuba by a Soviet-supplied SA-2 Guideline surface-to-air missile.
1988 – Ronald Reagan suspends construction of the new U.S. Embassy in Moscow because of Soviet listening devices in the building structure.
Births
1782 – Niccolò Paganini, Italian violinist and composer (d. 1840)
1811 – Isaac Singer, American actor and businessman, founded the Singer Corporation (d. 1875)
1858 – Theodore Roosevelt, colonel and politician, 26th President of the United States, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1919)
1908 – Lee Krasner, American painter (d. 1984)
1914 – Dylan Thomas, Welsh poet and playwright (d. 1953)
1923 – Roy Lichtenstein, American painter and sculptor (d. 1997)
1926 – H. R. Haldeman, businessman and diplomat, 4th White House Chief of Staff (d. 1993)
1932 – Sylvia Plath, American poet, novelist, and short story writer (d. 1963)
1939 – John Cleese, English actor, comedian, screenwriter and producer
1940 – John Gotti, American mob boss (d. 2002)
Deaths
1505 – Ivan III of Russia (b. 1440)
1927 – Squizzy Taylor, Australian gangster (b. 1888)
2013 – Lou Reed, singer-songwriter, guitarist, producer, and actor (b. 1942)
Edited from Wikipedia and other web sources
