| 1244 | | Turks expel the crusaders under Frederick II from Jerusalem. |
| 1305 | | Scottish patriot William Wallace is hanged, drawn, beheaded, and quartered in London. |
| 1541 | | Jacques Cartier lands near Quebec on his third voyage to North America. |
| 1711 | | A British attempt to invade Canada by sea fails. |
| 1775 | | King George III of England refuses the American colonies' offer of peace and declares them in open rebellion. |
| 1821 | | After 11 years of war, Spain grants Mexican independence as a constitutional monarchy. |
| 1863 | | Union batteries cease their first bombardment of Fort Sumter, leaving it a mass of rubble but still unconquered by the Northern besiegers. |
| 1900 | | Booker T. Washington forms the National Negro Business League in Boston, Massachusetts. |
| 1902 | | Fanny Farmer, among the first to emphasize the relationship of diet to health, opens her School of Cookery in Boston. |
| 1914 | | The Emperor of Japan declares war on Germany. |
| 1926 | | American film star Rudolph Valentino dies, causing world-wide hysteria and a number of suicides. |
| 1927 | | Immigrant laborers Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti are executed for a robbery they did not commit. Fifty years later, in 1977, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis establishes a memorial in the victims' honor. |
| 1939 | | Joseph Stalin and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop sign a non-aggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany, freeing Hitler to invade Poland and Stalin to invade Finland. |
| 1942 | | German forces begin an assault on the major Soviet industrial city of Stalingrad. |
| 1944 | | German SS engineers begin placing explosive charges around the Eiffel Tower in Paris. |
| 1950 | | Up to 77,000 members of the U.S. Army Organized Reserve Corps are called involuntarily to active duty to fight the Korean War. |
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