EVENTS
- 1543 – Nine months old baby, Mary Stuart, is crowned Queen of Scotland.
- 1776 – The Continental Congress officially names the United States.
- 1850 – California becomes the thirty-first U.S. state.
- 1943 – The invasion of Salerno began during World War II in Europe as Allied forces under General Mark Clark made amphibious landings along the western coast of Italy near Naples. Initial gains by the Allies met strong resistance from German forces.
- 1948 – Following the withdrawal of Soviet forces from North Korea, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was proclaimed with Pyongyang as its capital.
- 1956 – Elvis Presley first performs on The Ed Sullivan Show
- 1991 – Tajikistan declares its independence from the Soviet Union. The Central Asian country had been conquered by Russia in the late 19th century. In 1929, the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic was created as a constituent republic of the Soviet Union. Independence in 1991 came after the collapse of the USSR.
- 1993 – Israel and the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) agreed to recognize each other, paving the way for a possible peaceful end to the hundred year old conflict between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East.
- 1995 – The PlayStation game console is released by Sony in the US
- 2001 – Unix Billennium is Celebrated. Unix time or Unix epoch, POSIX time or Unix timestamp, is a time system that measures the number of seconds since midnight UTC of January 1, 1970, not counting leap seconds. At 01:46:40 UTC on October 9, 2001, Unix time reached the billionth second timestamp.
- 2007 – Manuel Noriega’s sentence in the United States ends. Manuel Noriega, former military ruler of Panama, was released after 17 years of imprisonment in the US. He was imprisoned on charges of drug trafficking, money laundering, and racketeering.
- 2015 – Queen Elizabeth becomes longest reigning British monarch. She broke the record set by Queen Victoria, who ascended to the throne on June 20, 1837, and reigned for 63 years, 7 months and 2 days.
BIRTHDAYS
- 1828 – Leo Tolstoy (Author wrote War and Peace)
- 1890 – Colonel Sanders (Founder of Kentucky Fried Chicken)
- 1941 – Otis Redding (Singer)
- 1960 – Hugh Grant (Actor)
- 1966 – Adam Sandler (Actor)
- 1969 – Rachel Hunter (Model)
- 1975 – Michael Buble (Singer)
DEATHS
- 1087 – William the Conqueror (King of England, Duke of Normandy)
- 1976 – Mao Zedong (Chinese military leader, politician)
- 1978 – Jack Warner (Canadian/American film producer)
- 2001 – Ahmad Shah Massoud (Afghan commander)
- 2003 – Edward Teller (Hungarian/American physicist)