1453: Constantinople fell to Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II, ending the Byzantine Empire.
1660: Charles II was restored to the English throne after the Puritan Commonwealth.
1721: South Carolina was formally incorporated as a royal colony.
1765: Patrick Henry denounced the Stamp Act before Virginia's House of Burgesses.
1790: Rhode Island became the last of the original thirteen colonies to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
1827: The first nautical school opened in Nantucket, MA, under the name Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin’s Lancasterian School.
1848: Wisconsin became the 30th state to join the United States.
1849: A patent for lifting vessels was granted to Abraham Lincoln.
1910: An airplane raced a train from Albany, NY, to New York City. The airplane pilot Glenn Curtiss won the $10,000 prize.
1911: The first running of the Indianapolis 500 took place.
1912: Fifteen women were dismissed from their jobs at the Curtis Publishing Company in Philadelphia, PA, for dancing the Turkey Trot while on the job.
1916: The official flag of the president of the United States was adopted.
1916: U.S. forces invaded Dominican Republic and remained until 1924.
1922: Ecuador became independent.
1922: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that organized baseball was a sport, not subject to antitrust laws.
1932: World War I veterans began arriving in Washington, DC. to demand cash bonuses they were not scheduled to receive for another 13 years.
1951: C.F. Blair became the first man to fly over the North Pole in single engine plane.
1953: Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay became first men to reach the top of Mount Everest.
1962: Buck (John) O’Neil became the first black coach in major league baseball when he accepted the job with the Chicago Cubs.
1965: Ralph Boston set a world record in the broad jump at 27-feet, 4-3/4 inches, at a meet held in Modesto, CA.
1973: Tom Bradley was elected the first black mayor of Los Angeles.
1974: U.S. President Nixon agreed to turn over 1,200 pages of edited Watergate transcripts.
1978: In the U.S., postage stamps were raised from 13 cents to 15 cents.
1981: The U.S. performed a nuclear test at the Nevada Test Site.
1985: Thirty-nine people were killed and 400 were injured in a riot at a European Cup soccer match in Brussels, Belgium.
1986: Colonel Oliver North told National Security Advisor William McFarlane that profits from weapons sold to Iran were being diverted to the Contras.
1988: U.S. President Reagan began his first visit to the Soviet Union in Moscow.
1988: NBC aired "To Heal A Nation," the story of Jan Scruggs' effort to build the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
1990: Boris Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian republic by the Russian parliament.
1995: The last 3 bodies were recovered from the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
1997: The ruling party in Indonesia, Golkar, won the Parliament election by a record margin. There was a boycott movement and rioting that killed 200 people.
1999: Space shuttle Discovery completed the first docking with the International Space Station.
2000: Fiji's military took control of the nation and declared martial law following a coup attempt by indigenous Fijians in mid-May.
2001: In New York, four followers of Osama bin Laden were convicted of a global conspiracy to murder Americans. The crimes included the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 224 people.
2001: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that disabled golfer Casey Martin could use a cart to ride in tournaments.