1707 – The first Siege of Pensacola ended with the failure of the British to capture Pensacola, Florida.

1775 – The Spanish established the Presidio San Augustin del Tucson in the town that became Tucson, Arizona.

1794 – Northwest Indian War: United States troops forced a confederacy of Shawnee, Mingo, Delaware, Wyandot, Miami, Ottawa, Chippewa, and Potawatomi warriors into a disorganized retreat at the Battle of Fallen Timbers.

1852 – Steamboat Atlantic sank on Lake Erie after a collision, with the loss of at least 150 lives.

1858 – Charles Darwin first published his theory of evolution through natural selection in The Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, alongside Alfred Russel Wallace’s same theory.

1866 – President Andrew Johnson formally declared the American Civil War over.

1882 – Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture debuted in Moscow, Russia.

1910 – Extreme fire weather in the Inland Northwest of the United States caused many small wildfires to coalesce into the Great Fire of 1910, which burned approximately 3 million acres and killed 87 people.

1920 – The first commercial radio station, 8MK (now WWJ), began operations in Detroit, Michigan.

1938 – Lou Gehrig hit his 23rd career grand slam, a record that stood for 75 years until it was broken by Alex Rodriguez.

1940 – World War II: British Prime Minister Winston Churchill made the fourth of his famous wartime speeches, containing the line “Never was so much owed by so many to so few”.

1940 – Louis Buchalter was indicted on murder charges in Los Angeles for the killing of Harry Greenberg, a mob associate of casino owner Meyer Lansky and mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel.

1965 – Rolling Stones released their single “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” (their 1st #1 US hit) in the UK.

1975 – Viking program: NASA launched the Viking 1 planetary probe toward Mars.

1977 – Voyager program: NASA launched the Voyager 2 spacecraft.

1986 – In Edmond, Oklahoma, U.S. Postal employee Patrick Sherrill gunned down 14 of his co-workers and then committed suicide.

1998 – U.S. embassy bombings: The United States launched cruise missile attacks against alleged al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical weapons plant in Sudan in retaliation for the August 7 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

---

To report an issue or typo with this article – CLICK HERE