180

6 inhabitants of Carthage, North Africa executed for being Christians. Earliest record of Christianity in this part of the world.

1203

Siege of Constantinople begins during the fourth Crusade; Roman Catholic Crusaders aboard a Venetian fleet attack the city.

1453

French forces routed the English in the Battle of Castillon, the concluding battle of the Hundred Years’ War.

1683

Turkish forces began the Siege of Vienna against the Habsburg Holy Roman emperor Leopold I.

1717

George Frideric Handel’s “Water Music” premieres repeatedly on a barge cruising the River Thames in London.

1762

Catherine II becomes Tsarina of Russia following the murder of Peter III.

1862

Abraham Lincoln’s wartime Congress passed the second Confiscation Act, a precursor to the Emancipation Proclamation.

1902

American mechanical engineer Willis Carrier completed drawings for what would became the first modern air conditioner.

1918

The Carpathia, the ocean liner that rescued the survivors of the Titanic in 1912, was sunk by a German U-boat during World War I.

1918

Former Russian tsar Nicholas II and his family were executed by Bolsheviks.

1936

A well-planned uprising by Nationalist rebels against the Republican government of Spain began this day in 1936, sparking a bloody civil war that lasted until 1939, when the Nationalists and Francisco Franco assumed power.

1944

German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel was seriously injured when his car was forced off the road by British fighter-bombers.

1945

Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Harry S. Truman met at the Potsdam Conference, the last Allied summit conference of World War II.

1945

President Harry S. Truman records his first impressions of Stalin in his diary.

1955

Disneyland, an amusement park featuring attractions based on the creations of Walt Disney and the Disney Company, opened in Anaheim, California.

1959

“North by Northwest” directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint premieres in Los Angeles.

1975

As part of a mission aimed at developing space rescue capability, the U.S. spacecraft Apollo 18 and the Soviet spacecraft Soyuz 19 rendezvous and dock in space.

1976

21st modern Olympic games opens in Montreal: 25 African teams (later rising to 33 nations) boycott the games due to New Zealand playing rugby in apartheid South Africa.

1996

TWA flight 800 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Long Island, killing all 230 people on board; a U.S. government inquiry determined that a mixture of fuel and air had ignited accidentally within a fuel tank, though others believe the jetliner was shot down by a missile.

1998

The United Nations completed the statute establishing the International Criminal Court, which began sittings four years later.

2014

Malaysia Airlines flight 17 crashed in separatist-held territory in Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board; a Dutch investigation later determined that the aircraft was shot down by a Russian-made surface-to-air missile.

2020

American civil rights leader and politician John Lewis—who helped lead the march that was halted by police violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, a landmark event in the history of the civil rights movement—died at age 80.