1534 – Jacques Cartier was the first European to reach Prince Edward Island.

1613 – The Globe Theatre in London, built by William Shakespeare’s playing company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, burned to the ground.

1620 – English crown banned tobacco growing in England, which gave the Virginia Company a monopoly in exchange for tax of one shilling per pound.

1864 – At least 99 people, mostly German and Polish immigrants, were killed in Canada’s worst railway disaster after a train failed to stop for an open drawbridge and plunged into the Rivière Richelieu near St-Hilaire, Quebec.

1888 – George Edward Gouraud recorded Handel’s Israel in Egypt onto a phonograph cylinder, thought for many years to be the oldest known recording of music.

1889 – Hyde Park and several other Illinois townships voted to be annexed by Chicago, which formed the largest United States city in area and second largest in population at the time.

1927 – The Bird of Paradise, a U.S. Army Air Corps Fokker tri-motor, completed the first transpacific flight, from the mainland United States to Hawaii.

1950 – Korean War: U.S. President Harry S. Truman authorized a sea blockade of Korea.

1952 – The First Miss Universe pageant was held. Armi Kuusela from Finland won the title of Miss Universe 1952.

1956 – The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956 was signed by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, which officially created the United States Interstate Highway System.

1957 – Buddy Holly recorded the song Peggy Sue.

1959 – Dick Clark announced that he was teaming up with Irvin Feld to stage a series of Dick Clark Caravans.

1967 – Keith Richards was found guilty of allowing his property to be used for the smoking of marijuana and was sentenced to one year in jail and was fined. Mick Jagger was found guilty of illegal possession of pep pills and was sentenced to three months in jail.

1968 – Pink Floyd’s second album A Saucerful of Secrets was released.

1969 – The Jimi Hendrix Experience played their last concert on the last day of the Denver Pop Festival.

1971 – Prior to re-entry (following a record-setting stay aboard the Soviet Union’s Salyut 1 space station), the crew capsule of the Soyuz 11 spacecraft depressurized and killed the three cosmonauts on board. Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsayev were the first humans to die in space.

1972 – The United States Supreme Court ruled in the case Furman v. Georgia that arbitrary and inconsistent imposition of the death penalty violates the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments and constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

1972 – A Convair CV-580 and De Havilland Canada DHC-6 Twin Otter collided above Lake Winnebago near Appleton, Wisconsin, killing 13.

1975 – Steve Wozniak tested his first prototype of the Apple I computer.

1987 – Vincent van Gogh’s painting, the Le Pont de Trinquetaille, was bought for $20.4 million at an auction in London, England.

1995 – Space Shuttle program: STS-71 Mission (Atlantis) docked with the Russian space station Mir for the first time.

1999 – Leif Garret was arrested during a sting operation at an apartment in Los Angeles, CA. He pled guilty to drug possession on August 14, 1999.

2006 – Hamdan v. Rumsfeld: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that President George W. Bush’s plan to try Guantanamo Bay detainees in military tribunals violates U.S. and international law.

2007 – Apple Inc. released its first mobile phone, the iPhone.

2012 – A derecho, a widespread, long-lived, straight-line wind storm that is associated with a fast-moving group of severe thunderstorms, swept across the eastern United States and left at least 22 people dead and millions without power.

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