1394 – Charles VI of France issued a decree for the general expulsion of Jews from France.
1564 – Maximillian II became emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.
1587 – Japanese strong-man Hideyoshi banned Christianity in Japan and ordered all Christians to leave.
1593 – France’s King Henry IV converted from Protestantism to Roman Catholicism.
1759 – British forces defeated a French army at Fort Niagara in Canada.
1799 – Napoleon Bonaparte defeated the Ottomans at Aboukir, Egypt.
1805 – Aaron Burr visited New Orleans with plans to establish a new country, with New Orleans as the capital city.
1845 – China granted Belgium equal trading rights with Britain, France and the United States.
1861 – The Crittenden Resolution, which called for the American Civil War to be fought to preserve the Union and not for slavery, was passed by the U.S. Congress.
1866 – Ulysses S. Grant was named General of the Army. He was the first American officer to hold the rank.
1868 – The U.S. Congress passed an act creating the Wyoming Territory.
1907 – Korea became a protectorate of Japan.
1909 – French aviator Louis Bleriot flew across the English Channel in a monoplane. He traveled from Calais to Dover in 37 minutes. He was the first man to fly across the channel.
1914 – Russia declared that it would act to protect Serbian sovereignty.
1924 – Greece announced the deportation of 50,000 Armenians.
1941 – The U.S. government froze all Japanese and Chinese assets.
1943 – Italian Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was overthrown in a coup.
1946 – The U.S. detonated an atomic bomb at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. It was the first underwater test of the device.
1952 – Puerto Rico became a self-governing commonwealth of the U.S.
1984 – Soviet cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya became the first woman to walk in space. She was aboard the orbiting space station Salyut 7.
1994 – Israel and Jordan formally ended the state of war that had existed between them since 1948.
1998 – The USS Harry S. Truman was commissioned and put into service by the U.S. Navy.
2010 – WikiLeaks leaked to the public more than 90,000 internal reports involving the U.S.-led War in Afghanistan from 2004-2010.