• 456 - Magister militum Ricimer defeats the Emperor Avitus at Piacenza and becomes master of the western Roman Empire.
• 1775 - Portland, Maine burnt by the British.
• 1780 - Royalton, Vermont and Tunbridge, Vermont last major raid of the American Revolutionary War.
• 1781 - George Washington captures Yorktown, Virginia after the Siege of Yorktown.
• 1793 - Marie Antoinette, wife of Louis XVI is guillotined at the height of the French Revolution.
• 1793 - Battle of Wattignies.
• 1813 - The Sixth Coalition attacks Napoleon Bonaparte in the Battle of Leipzig.
• 1834 - Much of the ancient structures of the Palace of Westminster in London is burnt down.
• 1841 - Queen's University is founded in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
• 1843 - Sir William Rowan Hamilton comes up with the idea of quaternions, a non-commutative extension of complex numbers.
• 1859 - John Brown leads raid on Harper's Ferry, West Virginia
• 1869 - Cardiff Giant, one of the most famous American hoaxes, is discovered.
• 1869 - England's first residential college for women, Girton College, Cambridge, is founded.
• 1875 - Brigham Young University is founded in Provo, Utah.
• 1882 - The Nickel Plate Railroad opens for business.
• 1905 - The Partition of Bengal (India) occurred.
• 1906 - The Captain of Köpenick fools the city hall of Köpenick and several soldiers by impersonating a Prussian officer.
• 1916 - Margaret Sanger founds Planned Parenthood by opening the first U.S. birth control clinic.
• 1923 - The Walt Disney Company is founded by Walt Disney and his brother, Roy Disney.
• 1934 - Chinese Communists begin the Long March; it ended a year and four days later, by which time Mao Zedong had regained his title as party chairman.
• 1939 - World War II: First attack on British territory by German Luftwaffe.
• 1940 - Benjamin O. Davis Sr. named first African American general in the United States Army.
• 1940 - Warsaw Ghetto established.
• 1945 - The Food and Agriculture Organization was founded in Quebec City, Canada.
• 1946 - Ten war criminals of the Second World War, condemned in the Nuremberg trials are hanged.
• 1949 - Nikolaos Zachariadis, leader of the Communist Party of Greece, announces a "temporary cease-fire", effectively ending the Greek Civil War.
• 1949 - The diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and German Democratic Republic were established.
• 1951 - The first Prime Minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan, is assassinated in Rawalpindi.
• 1962 - Cuban Missile Crisis between the United States and Cuba began.
• 1964 - People's Republic of China detonates its first nuclear weapon; Soviet leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Aleksey Kosygin are inaugurated as General Secreaty of the CPSU and Premier, respectively.
• 1968 - United States athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos are kicked out of the USA's team for performing a Black Power salute during a medal ceremony.
• 1968 - Kingston, Jamaica is rocked by the Rodney Riots, inspired by the barring of Walter Rodney from the country.
• 1970 - Canada - In response to the October Crisis terrorist kidnapping, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau invokes the War Measures Act.
• 1973 - Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho are awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
• 1975 - The Balibo Five, a group of Australian television journalists based in the town of Balibo in the then Portuguese Timor (now East Timor), are killed by Indonesian troops.
• 1978 - Pope John Paul II is elected in Rome.
• 1984 - Desmond Tutu is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
• 1987 - Great Storm of 1987: hurricane force winds to hit much of the South of England killing 23 people.
• 1991 - Luby's massacre: George Hennard runs amok in Killeen, Texas, killing 23 and wounding 20 in Luby's Cafeteria.
• 1991 - Jharkhand Chhatra Yuva Morcha is founded at a conference in Ranchi, India.
• 1993 - Anti-Nazi riot breaks out in Welling in Kent, after police stop protesters approaching British National Party headquarters
• 1995 - The Million Man March occurs in Washington, DC.
• 1996 - Eighty-four people are killed and more than 180 injured as 47,000 football fans attempt to squeeze into the 36,000-seat Estadio Mateo Flores in Guatemala City.
• 2000 - The United States Virginia State Commemorative Quarter is released.
• 2002 - Bibliotheca Alexandrina in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, a commemoration of the Library of Alexandria that was lost in antiquity, is officially inaugurated.

Births