612 BC Battle of Nineveh: The Neo-Babylonian Empire and the Median Empire combine forces invading Assyria.  The combined armies attack, brutally sack, and raze the capital, Nineveh.  The King of Assyrian Empire, Sinsharishkun, is killed.  Babylon emerges as the region’s strongest power, with further conquests led by King Nebuchadnezzar II.

70 Second Temple in Jerusalem set on fire by Roman army under Titus during the capture of the city

610 In Islam, the traditional date of the Laylat al-Qadr, when Muhammad began to receive the Qur'an

991 Battle of Maldon: English, led by Bryhtnoth, confront a band of inland-raiding Vikings near Maldon in Essex. The English are defeated and the story is immortalized in a well-known poem.

1346 Majorcan explorer Jaume Ferrer sets sail to find the legendary 'river of gold' along the West African coast (disappears without trace).  Majorca is the largest island of the Balearic Islands, which are part of Spain

1497 John Cabot tells King Henry VII of his trip to "Asia"

1500 Portuguese sea captain Diego Diaz is first European to sight Madagascar

1622 John Mason and Ferdinando Gorges receive a land patent of the Province of Maine by King James I of England

1653 Battle of Scheveningen: Final naval battle of the First Anglo-Dutch War, English fleet defeats a Dutch fleet led by Maarten Tromp who himself is killed by a sharpshooter in the rigging of William Penn's ship (Penn was the father of William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania)

1675 King Charles II and John Flamsteed lay the foundation stone of the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London

1680 Tewa medicine man, Popé, leads the Pueblo Rebellion against Spanish colonizers in the New Mexican Province, killing 400 and driving out another 2,000

1776 News of the United States Declaration of Independence reaches London during the American Revolutionary War

1821 Missouri admitted as 24th US state

1822 Antioch Syria, hit by Earthquake; about 20,000 die

1831 Hurricane hits Barbados; about 1,500 die

1833 Chicago incorporates as a village of about 200

1846 US Act of Congress passes establishing the Smithsonian Institution, now world's largest museum and research complex

1856 Hurricane washes away revelers at the resort island of Last Island, Louisiana.  200 people die and 200 survive

1869 O B Brown patents moving picture projector

1877 Battle of the Big Hole: US Army led by Colonel John Gibbon fights the Nez Perce led by Chief Joseph and Looking Glass in Montana, both sides suffer heavy casualties causing the Nez Perce to continue their long fighting retreat

1885 Leo Daft opens America's 1st commercially operated electric streetcar in Baltimore

1889 Britian Dan Rylands patents screw cap

1893 Chinese deported from San Francisco under Exclusion Act

1893 Rudolf Diesel's prime model internal combustion engine, a single 10-foot iron cylinder with a flywheel at its base, runs on its own power for the first time in Augsburg, Germany

1897 German chemist Felix Hoffmann first synthesizes acetylsalicylic acid, which would later be patented by his company Bayer under the name "aspirin"

1903 Famous Viking ship, the Oseberg, dated 820 AD, uncovered in a burial mound near Tønsberg, Norway, with two female skeletons and the bones of 15 horses

1906 Pope Pius X condemns 1905 French "Law on the Separation of the Churches and State" which allowed the State authority to control aspects of Catholic orthodoxy and worship

1914 German battle cruiser Goeben reaches Dardanellen/Turkey joins Germany

1920 Turkish government renounces its claim to Israel, recognizes British mandate

1921 FDR stricken with a paralytic illness at summer home on Canadian island of Campobello. At the time it was thought to be polio, but could possibly have been Guillain–Barré syndrome

1932 An 11.2-pound chondrite-type meteorite breaks into at least seven pieces and lands near the town of Archie in Cass County, Missouri.

1932 The Lego Group founded in Billund, Denmark, by Ole Kirk Christiansen; name is contraction of Danish words 'leg godt' ('play well' in English)

1936 114°F at Plain Dealing, Louisiana (state record)

1936 120°F at Ozark, Arkansas (state record)

1938 119°F at Pendleton, Oregon (state record)

1942 Henry J. Kaiser opens the Kaiser Richmond Field Hospital for Kaiser Shipyards in Richmond, California, pioneering the Kaiser Permanente health care model

1943 Adolf Hitler watches a lynching of allied pilots

1945 Japan announces willingness to surrender to Allies, provided Emperor Hirohito's status remains unchanged

1949 US National Military Establishment renamed Department of Defense

1954 At Massena, New York, the groundbreaking ceremony for the St. Lawrence Seaway is held.

1960 Discoverer 13, a Corona spy satellite, is launched into orbit; returned 1st object from space

1966 NASA launches Lunar Orbiter 1 to the Moon to photograph the lunar surface

1972 The Great Fireball, a rare daylight meteor seen from Utah, US to Alberta, Canada, passes 35 miles from Earth's surface

1973 1st BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train travels thru transbay tube to Montgomery St Station

1977 Postal employee David Berkowitz arrested in Yonkers NY, accused of being "Son of Sam" 44 caliber killer

1977 US & Panama sign Panama Canal Zone accord

1981 Coca-Cola Bottling Co agrees to pump $34 million into black business

1987 Flight Readiness Firing of Discovery's main engines is successfully

1990 NASA's Magellan spacecraft lands on Venus

1993 Ruth Bader Ginsburg sworn in as a US Supreme Court Justice

1994 Last British troops leave Hong Kong (been there since Sept 1841)

2003 The highest temperature ever recorded in the UK - 38.5°C (101.3°F) in Kent . It is the first time the UK has recorded a temperature over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

2006 Scotland Yard disrupts major terrorist plot to destroy aircraft travelling from the United Kingdom to the United States. All toiletries are banned from commercial aircraft.

2015 110°F, Apalachicola, Florida (breaking state record of 109°F, set in 1931)

2017 100 year-old fruit cake by Huntley & Palmers deemed "almost eatable" after being discovered in hut used by Captain Scott's expedition in Antarctica

2017 Scientists study identifying nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) deficiency major cause of miscarriages and multiple birth defects published in "New England Journal of Medicine"

2017 US President Donald Trump declares opioid addiction a national emergency

2018 Evidence of one million Uighurs being held in "counter-extremism centers" in China presented to UN Committee on Human Rights

2018 Landmark case against weed killer Roundup, San Francisco court awards groundsman Dewayne Johnson $289 million against Monsanto for giving him terminal cancer

2018 US ground crew member steals an Alaskan Air plane from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, flies for over an hour chased by military jets before fatally crashing on Ketron Island

2019 Financier Jeffrey Epstein found dead of an apparent suicide in his jail cell in New York, while awaiting trail for sex trafficking charges

2020 Hong Kong tycoon Jimmy Lai is the most high-profile figure arrested in Hong Kong under its new security laws

2020 Rare wind storm (derecho) hits the US Midwest flattening cornfields, leaving hundreds of thousands without electricity, killing two people

2023 24-hour approval granted to two rival robotaxi services in San Francisco - Cruise (General Motors) and Waymo (Google)

2023 Virgin Galactic flies its first space tourists to the edge of space from Spaceport America, New Mexico