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Events

490 BC - Athens defeats Persia at the Battle of Marathon - but see 12 August; origin of the marathon long-distance race (attributed to Pheidippides)

1213 - Albigensian Crusade: Simon de Montfort, 5th Earl of Leicester defeats Peter II of Aragon, the king of Aragon at the Battle of Muret.

1229 - An Aragonese-Catalan army under the command of James I of Aragon disembarks at Santa Ponça, Mallorca, with the purpose of conquering the island.

1609 - Henry Hudson discovers the Hudson River.

1683 - Austro-Ottoman War: Battle of Vienna - Several European armies join forces to defeat the Ottoman Empire.

1814 - Battle of North Point: An American detachment halts the British land advance to Baltimore in the War of 1812.

1846 - Elizabeth Barrett elopes with Robert Browning.

1847 - Mexican-American War: The Battle of Chapultepec begins. U.S. Army deserters in the Saint Patrick's Battalion who fought alongside the Mexican army are hanged en masse for treason by the order of General Winfield Scott.

1890 - Salisbury, Rhodesia, is founded.

1930 - Wilfred Rhodes ends his 1110-game first-class career by taking 5 for 95 for H.D.G. Leveson Gower's XI against the Australians.

1933 - Leó Szilárd, waiting for a red light on Southampton Row in Bloomsbury, conceives the idea of the nuclear chain reaction.

1938 - Adolf Hitler demands autonomy for the Germans of the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia.

1940 - Cave paintings discovered in Lascaux, France.

 
 

1940 - The Hercules Munitions Plant in Kenvil, New Jersey explodes, killing 55 people.

1942 - RMS Laconia, carrying civilians, Allied soldiers and Italian POWs is torpedoed off the coast of West Africa and sinks.

1943 - Benito Mussolini, dictator of Italy, is rescued from house arrest by German commando Otto Skorzeny

1944 - The liberation of Serbia from Nazi Germany and the Chetniks continues. Bajina Ba?ta in western Serbia is among those liberated cities.

1947 - The U.S. Screen Actors Guild implements an anti-Communist loyalty oath

1953 - Nikita Khrushchev is elected first secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union

1953 - John F. Kennedy marries Jackie Bouvier.

1957 - NORAD begins operations.

1959 - Bonanza premiers. First regularly-scheduled TV program presented in color.

1962 - President John F. Kennedy declares the USA will get a man on the moon, and safely bring him back, by the end of the decade.

1974 - Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, 'Messiah' of the Rastafari movement, is deposed following a military coup by the Derg.

1974 - Juventude Africana Amilcar Cabral is founded in Guinea-Bissau.

1977 - South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko is killed in police custody.

 
 

1979 - Indonesia is hit with an earthquake that measures 8.1 on the Richter scale.

1980 - Military coup in Turkey

1983 - A Wells Fargo depot in West Hartford, Connecticut, United States, was robbed of approximately US$7 million by Los Macheteros .

1990 - The two German states and the Four Powers sign the Treaty on the Final Settlement With Respect to Germany in Moscow, paving the way for German re-unification.

1992 - NASA launches Space Shuttle Endeavour on STS-47 which marked the 50th shuttle mission. On board is Mae Carol Jemison who becomes the first African-American woman in space.

1992 - Abimael Guzmán, leader of the Shining Path, is captured by Peruvian special forces; shortly thereafter the rest of Shining Path's leadership fell as well.

1993 - NASA launches, on the 4th launch attempt, Space Shuttle Discovery on mission STS-51 which marked the 57th Space Shuttle mission. During this spectacular mission the ACTS was inserted into orbit as well as (temporarily) SPAS. Practice was also gained for the Hubble Space Telescope repair mission through EVA. This mission ended with the 6th night landing of the Shuttle, at The Kennedy Space Centre.

1994 - Frank Eugene Corder crashes a Cessna 150 into the White House's south lawn, striking the West wing and killing himself.

2001 - NATO Article V of the NATO agreement is invoked for the first time in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States of America.

2003 - The United Nations lifted sanctions against Libya after that country agreed to accept responsibility and recompense the families of victims in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103

2005 - The red-green coalition, led by Jens Stoltenberg, wins the Norwegian parliamentary election, taking 87 of 169 seats in the parliament.

2005 - Israel completes its withdrawal of all troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip.

2005 - A blackout in Los Angeles affects millions of Californians.

 

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