1215: King John of England put his seal on the Magna Carta.
1381: The English peasant revolt was crushed in London.
1389: Ottoman Turks crushed Serbia in the Battle of Kosovo.
1607: Colonists in North America completed James Fort in Jamestown.
1667: Jean-Baptiste Denys administered the first fully-documented human blood transfusion.
1752: Benjamin Franklin experimented by flying a kite during a thunderstorm. The result was a little spark that showed the relationship between lightning and electricity.
1775: George Washington was appointed head of the Continental Army by the Second Continental Congress.
1836: Arkansas became the 25th U.S. state.
1844: Charles Goodyear was granted a patent for the process that strengthens rubber.
1846: The United States and Britain settled a boundary dispute concerning the boundary between the U.S. and Canada, by signing a treaty.
1864: An order to establish a military burial ground was signed by Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton. The location later became known as Arlington National Cemetery.
1866: Prussia attacked Austria.
1877: Henry O. Flipper became the first African American to graduate from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
1898: The U.S. House of representatives approved the annexation of Hawaii.
1904: The steamboat General Slocum erupted in fire killing more than 1,000 in New York City's East River.
1909: Benjamin Shibe patented the cork center baseball.
1911: The Computing-Tabulating-Recording Co. was incorporated in the state of New York. The company was later renamed International Business Machines (IBM) Corp.
1916: U.S. President Woodrow Wilson signed a bill incorporating the Boy Scouts of America.
1917: Great Britain pledged the release of all the Irish captured during the Easter Rebellion of 1916.
1919: Captain John Alcock and Lt. Arthur W. Brown won $50,000 for successfully completing the first, non-stop trans-Atlantic plane flight.
1932: Gaston Means was sentenced to 15 years for fraud in the Lindbergh baby kidnapping.
1938: Johnny Vandemeer, of the Cincinnati Reds, pitched his second straight no-hitter.
1940: The French fortress of Verdun was captured by Germans.
1944: American forces began their successful invasion of Saipan during World War II.
1947: The All-Indian Congress accepted a British plan for the partition of India.
1958: Greece severed military ties to Turkey because of the Cypress issue.
1964: The last French troops left Algeria.
1978: King Hussein of Jordan married 26-year-old American Lisa Halaby, who became Queen Noor.
1981: The U.S. agreed to provide Pakistan with $3 billion in military and economic aid from October 1982 to October 1987.
1983: The U.S. Supreme Court reinforced its position on abortion by striking down state and local restriction on abortions.
1985: U.S. Navy diver Robert D. Stethem was killed by the hijackers of Flight 847.
1986: Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, reported that the chief engineer of the Chernobyl nuclear plant was dismissed for mishandling the incident at the plant.
1989: In Shanghai three Chinese workers were sentenced to death for setting fire to a train during a pro-democracy protest.
1992: It was ruled by the U.S. Supreme Court that the government could kidnap criminal suspects from foreign countries for prosecution.
1992: U.S. Vice President Dan Quayle instructed a student to spell "potato" with an "e" on the end during a spelling bee. He had relied on a faulty flash card that had been written by the student's teacher.
1994: Israel and the Vatican established full diplomatic relations.
1995: During the O.J. Simpson murder trial, O.J. was asked to put on a pair of gloves. The gloves were said to have been worn by the killer on the night of the murders of Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman. The gloves appeared not to fit.
1996: The Irish Republican Army set of a truck bomb in a retail district in Manchester England. The explosion wounded more than 200 people.
1998: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state prison inmates are protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act.
1999: South Korean naval forces sank a North Korean torpedo boat during an exchange in the disputed Yellow Sea.
2003: In northeast London, a trailer was stolen that contained thousands of copies of J.K. Rowling's book "Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix." The empty trailer was discovered two days later.
2006: The U.S. Supreme Court said that judges cannot throw out evidence collected by police who have search warrants but do not properly announced their arrival.
