1647 – Alse Young (Achsah Young or Alice Young), a resident of Windsor, CT, was executed for being a “witch.” It was the first recorded American execution of a “witch.”

1668 – Three colonists were expelled from Massachusetts for being Baptists.

1813 – Americans captured Fort George, Canada.

1919 – A U.S. Navy seaplane completed the first transatlantic flight.

1929 – Colonel Charles Lindbergh and Anne Spencer Murrow were married.

1931 – Piccard and Knipfer made the first flight into the stratosphere, by balloon.

1941 – U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed an “unlimited national emergency” amid rising world tensions.

1941 – The German battleship Bismarck was sunk by British naval and air forces. 2,300 people were killed.

1942 – German General Erwin Rommel began a major offensive in Libya with his Afrika Korps.

1944 – U.S. General MacArthur landed on Biak Island in New Guinea.

1960 – A military coup overthrew the democratic government of Turkey.

1964 – Indian Prime Minister Jawaharla Nehru died.

1985 – In Beijing, representatives of Britain and China exchanged instruments of ratification on the pact returning Hong Kong to the Chinese in 1997.

1988 – The U.S. Senate ratified the INF treaty. The INF pact was the first arms-control agreement since the 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) to receive Senate approval.

1996 – Russian President Boris Yeltsin negotiated a cease-fire to the war in Chechnya in his first meeting with the leader of the rebels.

1999 – In The Hague, Netherlands, a war crimes tribunal indicted Slobodan Milosevic and four others for atrocities in Kosovo. It was the first time that a sitting head of state had been charged with such a crime.