1471 Battle of Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire, final battle between the Houses of Lancaster and York: Prince of Wales, Edward of Westminster killed and King Edward IV returns to his throne, restoring political stability to England until his death in 1483

1535 Five Carthusian monks from London Charterhouse monastery hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn, London, for refusing to acknowledge Henry VIII as head of the Church of England

1626 Peter Minuit becomes director-general of New Netherlands, who is mainly remembered for his fabulous purchase of Manhattan Island (the nucleus of New York City) from the Indians for trade goods worth a mere 60 guilders.

1776 Rhode Island declares independence from Great Britain

1780 American Academy of Arts & Science founded in Boston, James Bowdoin, John and Samuel Adams founding members

1783 William Herschel reports seeing a red glow near lunar crater Aristarchus

1846 US state of Michigan ends the death penalty

1847 NY State creates a Board of Commissioners of Emigration

1866 Woodward's Gardens opens to the public in San Francisco

1868 World's largest book, the Kuthodaw Inscription Shrines recording whole of Buddhist scriptures on 729 marble tablets completed and opened to the public in Mandalay, Burma

1883 John Gordon Cashmans publishes 1st edition "Vicksburg Evening Post" (Mississippi)

1896 1st edition of London Daily Mail (halfpenny)

1896 Grease fire ignites at mining town of Cripple Creek, Colorado.  Firefighters use dynamite to topple buildings to check the flames.

1904 Charles Rolls meets Henry Royce at the Midland Hotel in Manchester, England. Go on to form the car manufacturer Roll-Royce.

1904 Construction begins by the United States on the Panama Canal

1917 A flotilla of US destroyer ships arrive in Queenstown, Ireland, to aid in convoying ships to England

1923 New York state revokes its Mullan-Gage Act Liquor Enforcement law; federal Volstead Act still in place

1925 League of Nations conference on arms control & poison gas usage

1927 1st balloon flight over 40,000 feet (Scott Field, Illinois)

1932 Al Capone enters Atlanta Penitentiary convicted of income tax evasion

1933 Pulitzer Prize for poetry awarded to American Archibald Macleish for "Conquistador"

1936 Pulitzer prize for the novel awarded to American Harold L. Davis for "Honey in the Horn"

1942 Food 1st rationed in US

1946 5 die in a 2 day riot at Alcatraz prison in San Francisco bay

1948 The Hague Court of Justice convicts Nazi SS officer in the Netherlands Hans Rauter of Crimes against Humanity (executed 24 March 1949)

1953 Pulitzer Prize for Literature awarded to Ernest Hemingway for "The Old Man and The Sea"

1957 Anne Frank Foundation forms in Amsterdam

1961 CORE, Congress of Racial Equality, begins freedom rides from Washington, D.C.

1961 Commander Malcolm Ross & Lieutenant Victor Prather, both US Navy, reach 34,668 m (record) in balloon, USN Strato-Lab V.

1964 Soap, "Another World" premieres on TV in the US

1964 Pulitzer prize for General Non-Fiction awarded to Richard Hofstadter for "Anti-intellectualism"

1966 Soviet government signs accord about building Fiat factory in USSR

1970 National Guard kills 4 student anti-war protesters at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio

1972 "The Don't Make A Wave Committee," a fledgling environmental organization founded in Canada in 1971, officially changes its name to the "Greenpeace Foundation"

1973 1st TV network female nudity in "Steambath" on PBS by Valerie Perrine

1979 Margaret Thatcher becomes the first woman to be elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

1984 Itaipu Dam begins generating electricity on the border between Paraguay and Brazil, - the world's second largest generator of electricity (considered one of the seven engineering wonders of the modern world)

1988 PEPCON chemical plant in Henderson, Nevada explodes killing 2 and injuring 372 causing damage within 10-mile (16 km) radius

1989 NASA launches space shuttle Atlantis (STS-30) from the Kennedy Space Center, Florida

1989 NASA launches Magellan probe to Venus from Space Shuttle Atlantis

1992 US Army and Marine Corps forces arrive in Los Angeles to end rioting following the acquittal of four police officers over the beating of Rodney King

1998 A federal judge in Sacramento, California, gives "Unabomber" Ted Kaczynski four life sentences plus 30 years after Kaczynski accepts a plea agreement sparing him from the death penalty.

2001 The Milwaukee Art Museum addition, the first Santiago Calatrava-designed structure in the United States, opens to the public

2007 Greensburg, Kansas is almost completely destroyed by a 1.7m wide EF-5 tornado

2013 Harper Lee files a lawsuit against a literary agent over the copyright of "To Kill a Mockingbird"

2018 California overtakes Great Britain to become the worlds fifth largest economy

2021 Malian woman Halima Cisse gives birth to nonuplets (nine babies) in Morocco, in only the third known case worldwide

2022 "'World's most dangerous trafficker" Colombian drug kingpin Dairo Antonio Úsuga (known as Otoniel) is extradited to the US for drug charges

2022 US Federal Reserve makes largest interest rate increase since 2000 (+0.5%), attempting to combat the fastest rate of inflation in four decades