312 – Constantine the Great is said to have received his famous Vision of the Cross.
710 – Saracen invasion of Sardinia.
939 – Ethelstan, the first King of England, died and was succeeded by his half-brother, Edmund I.
1275 – Traditional founding of the city of Amsterdam.
1524 – Italian Wars: The French troops lay siege to Pavia.
1682 – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania is founded.
1795 – The United States and Spain sign the Treaty of Madrid, which establishes the boundaries between Spanish colonies and the U.S.
1806 – The French Army enters Berlin, following the Battle of Jena–Auerstedt.
1810 – United States annexes the former Spanish colony of West Florida.
1838 – Missouri governor Lilburn Boggs issues the Extermination Order, which orders all Mormons to leave the state or be exterminated.
1870 – Marshal François Achille Bazaine surrenders to Prussian forces at the conclusion of the Siege of Metz along with 140,000 French soldiers in one of the biggest French defeats of the Franco-Prussian War.
1914 – The British lose their first battleship of World War I: The British super-dreadnought battleship HMS Audacious (23,400 tons) is sunk off Tory Island, north-west of Ireland, by a minefield laid by the armed German merchant-cruiser Berlin. The loss was kept an official secret in Britain until 14 November 1918 (three days after the end of the war). The sinking was witnessed and photographed by passengers on RMS Olympic sister ship of RMS Titanic.
1922 – A referendum in Rhodesia rejects the country’s annexation to the South African Union.
1924 – The Uzbek SSR is founded in the Soviet Union.
1930 – Ratifications exchanged in London for the first London Naval Treaty, signed in April modifying the 1925 Washington Naval Treaty and the arms limitation treaty’s modified provisions, go into effect immediately, further limiting the expensive naval arms race among its five signatories.
1944 – World War II: German forces capture Banská Bystrica during Slovak National Uprising thus bringing it to an end.
1948 – Léopold Sédar Senghor founds the Senegalese Democratic Bloc.
1954 – Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. becomes the first African-American general in the United States Air Force.
1958 – Iskander Mirza, the first President of Pakistan, is deposed in a bloodless coup d’état by General Ayub Khan, who had been appointed the enforcer of martial law by Mirza 20 days earlier.
1961 – NASA tests the first Saturn I rocket in Mission Saturn-Apollo 1.
1962 – Major Rudolf Anderson of the United States Air Force becomes the only direct human casualty of the Cuban Missile Crisis when his U-2 reconnaissance airplane is shot down in Cuba by a Soviet-supplied SA-2 Guideline surface-to-air missile.
1962 – A plane carrying Enrico Mattei, post-war Italian administrator, crashes in mysterious circumstances.
1971 – The Democratic Republic of the Congo is renamed Zaire.
1973 – A 1.4 kg chondrite-type meteorite strikes in Cañon City, Colorado.
1979 – Saint Vincent and the Grenadines gains its independence from the United Kingdom.
1981 – The Soviet submarine U 137 runs aground on the east coast of Sweden.
1991 – Turkmenistan achieves independence from the Soviet Union.
1994 – Gliese 229B is the first Substellar Mass Object to be unquestionably identified.
2014 – Britain withdraws from Afghanistan after the end of Operation Herrick which started on June 20, 2002 after 12 years four months and seven days.
