1850 ~  Prussia agreed to pull out of Schlewig and Holstein, Germany.

1881 ~ Charles J. Guiteau fatally wounded U.S.President James A. Garfield in Washington, DC. 

1926 ~ ThThe U.S. Congress established the Army Air Corps.

1939 ~ At Mount Rushmore, Theodore Roosevelt's face was dedicated. 

1947 ~ An object crashed near Roswell, NM The U.S. Army Air Force insisted it was a weather balloon, but eyewitness accounts led to speculation that it might have been an alien spacecraft.

1961 ~ Ernest Hemingway shot himself to death at his home in Ketchum, ID.

1964 ~ U.S. President Johnson signed the "Civil Rights Act of 1964" into law. The act made it illegal in the U.S. to discriminate against others because of their race.

1967 ~ The U.S. Marine Corps launched Operation Buffalo in response to the North Vietnamese Army's efforts to seize the Marine base at Con Thien.

1976 ~ The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the death penalty was not inherently cruel or unusual.

1985 ~ General Motors announced that it was installing electronic road maps as an option in some of its higher-priced cars.

1994 ~ Colombian soccer player Andres Escobar was shot to death in Medellin. 10 days earlier he had accidentally scored a goal against his own team in World Cup competition.

1998 ~ Cable News Network (CNN) retracted a story that alleged that U.S. commandos had used nerve gas to kill American defectors during the Vietnam War.

2000 ~  In Mexico, Vicente Fox Quesada of the National Action Party (PAN) defeated Francisco Labastida Ochoa of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in the presidential election. The PRI had controlled the presidency in Mexico since the party was founded in 1929.