• 1009 - The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, a Christian church in Jerusalem, is completely destroyed by the Fatimid caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, who hacks the Church's foundations down to bedrock.
• 1016 - The Danes defeat the Saxons in the Battle of Ashingdon.
• 1081 - The Normans defeat the Byzantine Empire in the Battle of Dyrrhachium.
• 1210 - Pope Innocent III excommunicates German leader Otto IV .
• 1356 - Basel earthquake, the most significant historic seismological event north of the Alps, destroyed the town of Basel, Switzerland.
• 1386 - Opening of the University of Heidelberg
• 1561 - Fourth Battle of Kawanakajima -- Takeda Shingen defeats Uesugi Kenshin in the climax of their ongoing conflicts.
• 1648 - Boston Shoemakers form first U.S. labor organization.
• 1685 - Louis XIV of France revokes the Edict of Nantes, which has protected French Protestants.
• 1748 - Signing of the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle ends the War of the Austrian Succession.
• 1767 - Mason-Dixon line, survey separating Maryland from Pennsylvania is completed.
• 1775 - African-American poet Phillis Wheatley freed from slavery.
• 1851 - Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is first published as The Whale by Richard Bentley of London.
• 1860 - The Second Opium War finally ends at the Convention of Peking with the ratification of the Treaty of Tientsin, an unequal treaty.
• 1867 - United States takes possession of Alaska after purchasing it from Russia for $7.2 million. Celebrated annually in the state as Alaska Day.
• 1898 - United States takes possession of Puerto Rico.
• 1908 - Belgium annexes the Congo Free State.
• 1912 - The First Balkan War begins.
• 1922 - The British Broadcasting Company (later Corporation) is founded by a consortium, to establish a nationwide network of radio transmitters to provide a national broadcasting service.
• 1925 - The Grand Ole Opry opens in Nashville, Tennessee.
• 1929 - Women are considered "Persons" under Canadian law.
• 1944 - Adolf Hitler orders the establishment of a German national militia.
• 1944 - Soviet Union invades Czechoslovakia.
• 1945 - The USSR's nuclear program receives plans for the USA's plutonium bomb from Klaus Fuchs at the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
• 1945 - A group of the Venezuelan Armed Forces, led by Mario Vargas, Marcos Pérez Jiménez and Carlos Delgado Chalbaud, staged a coup d'etát against then president Isaías Medina Angarita, who was overthrown by the end of the day.
• 1954 - Texas Instruments announces the first Transistor radio.
• 1964 - The 1964-1965 New York World's Fair closes for its first season after a six-month run.
• 1967 - The Soviet probe Venera 4 reaches Venus and becomes the first spacecraft to measure the atmosphere of another planet.
• 1968 - The U.S. Olympic Committee suspends two black athletes for giving a "black power" salute during a victory ceremony at the Mexico City games.
• 1968 - Bob Beamon sets a world record of 8.90m in the long jump at the Mexico City games. This becomes the longest unbroken track and field record in history, standing for 23 years, and is later named by Sports Illustrated magazine as one of the five greatest sporting moments of the 20th century.
• 1977 - German Autumn: a set of events revolving around the kidnapping of Hanns-Martin Schleyer and the hijacking of a Lufthansa flight by the Red Army Faction (RAF) comes to an end when Schleyer is executed and various RAF members allegedly commit suicide. The West German government states that it would never again negotiate with terrorists.
• 1989 - East German leader Erich Honecker resigns.
• 1991 - Azerbaijan declares independence from USSR.
• 2003 - Bolivian Gas War: President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, is forced to resign and leave Bolivia.
• 2007 - After 8 years in exile, Benazir Bhutto returns to her homeland Pakistan. The same night, suicide attackers blow themselves up near Bhutto's convoy, killing over 100 in the cheering crowd, including 20 police officers. Bhutto escaped uninjured.

Births