EVENTS
- 1693 – Mt. Etna erupts and there is an earthquake in Sicily, Italy.
- 1861 – Alabama seceded from the Union in events leading to up the American Civil War.
- 1863 – American Civil War: Battle of Arkansas Post ends.
- 1908 – Grand Canyon National Monument is created.
- 1922 – First use of insulin to treat diabetes in a human patient.
- 1935 – Amelia Earhart is the first woman to fly solo from Hawaii to California.
- 1962 – A massive landslide kills 4,000 in Peru. Nine villages in the Río Santa Valley were engulfed by a 12-meter wall of rock and ice.
- 1964 – The U.S. Surgeon General declared cigarettes may be hazardous to health, the first such official government report.
- 1985 – The first Rock in Rio music festival is held. A whopping 1.5 million people attended, making it the world’s largest music festival.
- 1990 – In Lithuania, 200,000 persons demanded political independence from Soviet Russia after Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the Soviet Union, publicly warned that separatism could lead to tragedy. Independence was achieved in September of 1991, three months before the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.
- 2002 – The first prisoners arrive in Guantanamo Bay. Following reports of torture, Amnesty International called the situation at the US detention camp a “human rights scandal”.
BIRTHDAYS
- 1757 – Alexander Hamilton (First US Secretary of the Treasury)
- 1934 – Jean Chrétien (Canadian politician, 20th Prime Minister of Canada)
- 1946 – Naomi Judd (Singer with The Judds)
- 1987 – Jamie Vardy (English footballer)
- 1952 – Ben Crenshaw (Golfer)
- 1971 – Mary J. Blige (Singer)
- 1973 – Rahul Dravid (Indian cricketer)
- 1979 – Siti Nurhaliza (Malaysian singer-songwriter, producer)
DEATHS
- 1941 – Emanuel Lasker (German chess player)
- 2008 – Edmund Hillary (New Zealand mountaineer, explorer)
- 2013 – Aaron Swartz (American computer programmer, activist)
- 2013 – Nguyen Khanh (Vietnamese general, politician, 3rd President of South Vietnam)
- 2014 – Ariel Sharon (Israeli general, politician, 11th Prime Minister of Israel)