| 1497 | | John Cabot returns to England after his first successful journey to the Labrador coast. |
| 1863 | | The CSS Alabama captures the USS Sea Bride near the Cape of Good Hope. |
| 1888 | | Martha Turner is murdered by an unknown assailant, believed to be Jack the Ripper, in London, England. |
| 1890 | | William Kemmler becomes the first man to be executed by the electric chair. |
| 1904 | | The Japanese army in Korea surrounds a Russian army retreating to Manchuria. |
| 1914 | | Ellen Louise Wilson, the first wife of the twenty-eighth president, Woodrow Wilson, dies of Barite's disease. |
| 1927 | | A Massachusetts high court hears the final plea from Sacco and Vanzetti, two Italians convicted of murder. |
| 1942 | | The Soviet city of Voronezh falls to the German army. |
| 1945 | | Paul Tibbets, the commander of Enola Gay, drops the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.It was the second atomic bomb, dropped on Nagasaki, that induced the Japanese to surrender. |
| 1965 | | President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act, outlawing the literacy test for voting eligibility in the South. |
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