1532 – Inca Emperor Atahualpa‘s refusal to pay tribute to Charles V prompts Francisco Pizarro to attack the Inca Army in the Battle of Cajamarca. Pizarro and his men take Atahualpa hostage. This interaction marked the beginning of the end of the Inca Empire.
1793 – Ninety Roman Catholic Priests, dissidents of the French Revolution, are executed by drowning at Nantes.
1822 – Missouri trader William Becknell arrives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, over a route that became known as the Santa Fe Trail.
1849 – A Russian court sentences writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky to death for anti-government activities linked to a radical intellectual group. His sentence is later commuted to hard labor.
1855 – David Livingstone becomes the first European to see Victoria Falls.
1871 – The National Rifle Association receives its charter from New York State.
1904 – English engineer John Ambrose Fleming receives a patent for the thermionic valve – a vacuum tube.
1907 – Cunard Line’s RMS Mauretania, sister ship of RMS Lusitania, sets sail on her maiden voyage from Liverpool to New York City.
1914 – The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States officially opens.
1940 – In occupied Poland, the Nazis close off the Warsaw Ghetto from the outside world.
1940 – New York City’s “Mad Bomber” George Metesky places his first bomb at a Manhattan office building used by Consolidated Edison.
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Satallite view of Victoria Falls
The Zambezi River divides Zambia and Zimbabwe
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1992 – The Hoxne Hoard, buried coins, silverware, and jewelery from the Roman Empire, is discovered by metal detectorist Eric Lawes in Hoxne, Suffolk.
1997 – After nearly 18 years of incarceration, the People’s Republic of China releases Wei Jingsheng, a pro-democracy dissident, from jail for medical reasons.
Births
1922 – Gene Amdahl, American computer scientist, physicist, and engineer (d. 2015)
Deaths
2006 – Milton Friedman, American economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate. Friedman was still a working economist at the time of his death and his last column in The Wall Street Journal was published the following day. (b. 1912)