1535 – French explorer Jacques Cartier set sail for North America.
1536 – Anne Boleyn, the second wife of England’s King Henry VIII, was beheaded after she was convicted of adultery.
1568 – After being defeated by the Protestants, Mary the Queen of Scots, fled to England where she was imprisoned by Queen Elizabeth.
1588 – The Spanish Armada set sail from Lisbon, bound for England.
1608 – The Protestant states formed the Evangelical Union of Lutherans and Calvinists.
1643 – Delegates from four New England colonies met in Boston to form a confederation.
1643 – The French army defeated a Spanish army at Rocroi, France.
1864 – The Union and Confederate armies launched their last attacks against each other at Spotsylvania in Virginia.
1911 – The first American criminal conviction that was based on fingerprint evidence occurred in New York City.
1926 – Thomas Edison spoke on the radio for the first time.
1926 – Benito Mussolini announced that democracy was deceased. Rome became a fascist state.
1926 – In Damascus, Syria, French shells killed 600 people.
1943 – Winston Churchill told the U.S. Congress that his country was pledging their full support in the war against Japan.
1958 – Canada and the U.S. formally established the North American Air Defense Command.
1964 – The U.S. State Department reported that diplomats had found about 40 microphones planted in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.
1967 – The Soviet Union ratified a treaty with the United States and Britain that banned nuclear weapons from outer space.
1967 – U.S. planes bombed Hanoi for the first time.
2003 – Hundreds of Albert Einstein’s scientific papers, personal letters and humanist essays were made available on the Internet. Einstein had given the papers to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in his will.
