1620 – A determined band of 35 religious dissenters – Pilgrims set sail for Virginia from Plymouth, England in the Mayflower, jubilant at the prospect of practicing their unorthodox brand of worship in the New World.

1776 – American Revolutionary War: The Battle of Harlem Heights was fought.

1779 – American Revolutionary War: The Franco-American Siege of Savannah began.

1810 – With the Grito de Dolores, Father Miguel Hidalgo began Mexico’s fight for independence from Spain.

1863 – Robert College, in Istanbul, the first American educational institution outside the United States, was founded by Christopher Robert, an American philanthropist.

1880 – The Cornell Daily Sun printed its first issue in Ithaca, New York.

1893 – Settlers made a land run for prime land in the Cherokee Strip in Oklahoma.

1908 – The General Motors Corporation was founded.

1920 – The Wall Street bombing: A bomb in a horse wagon exploded in front of the J. P. Morgan building in New York City killing 38 and injuring 400.

1943 – World War II: The German Tenth Army reported that it could no longer contain the Allied bridgehead around Salerno.

1945 – World War II: The Japanese occupation of Hong Kong came to an end.

1953 – American Airlines Flight 723 crashed in Colonie, New York, killing 28 people.

1955 – A Soviet Zulu-class submarine became the first to launch a ballistic missile.

1959 – The first successful photocopier, the Xerox 914, was introduced in a demonstration on live television from New York City.

1959 – The musical The Sound of Music” opened on Broadway at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre.

1961 – The United States National Hurricane Research Project dropped eight cylinders of silver iodide into the eyewall of Hurricane Esther. Wind speed reduced by 10%, giving rise to Project Stormfury.

1961 – Typhoon Nancy, with possibly the strongest winds ever measured in a tropical cyclone, made landfall in Osaka, Japan, killing 173 people.

1966 – The Metropolitan Opera House opened at Lincoln Center in New York City with the world premiere of Samuel Barber’s opera Antony and Cleopatra.

1976 – Armenian champion swimmer Shavarsh Karapetyan saved 20 people from a trolleybus that had fallen into a Yerevan reservoir.

1979 – Eight people escaped from East Germany to the west in a homemade hot air balloon.

1988 – Stan Love, former Beach Boys manager and the brother of lead singer Mike Love, was sentenced to 5 years probation for embezzling more than $300,000 from the band.

1992 – The trial of the deposed Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega ended in the United States with a 40-year sentence for drug trafficking and money laundering.

2004 – Hurricane Ivan made landfall in Gulf Shores, Alabama as a Category 3 hurricane.

2013 – A gunman killed twelve people at the Washington Navy Yard.

2019 – Five months before the COVID-19 stock market crash, an overnight spike in lending rates in the United States prompted the Federal Reserve to conduct operations in the repo market.

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