79 Mt Vesuvius erupts, buries Pompeii & Herculaneum
410 Rome overrun by Visigoths, symbolized fall of Western Roman Empire
1572 King Charles IX orders massacre of thousands of French Protestants
1662 Act of Uniformity requires English to accept book of Common Prayer
1682 DE awarded to William Penn
1751 Thomas Colley executed in England for drowning supposed witch
1814 British sack Washington, DC, White House burned
1853 1st potato chips prepared by Chef George Crum (Saratoga Springs, NY)
1854 National emigration convention meets in Cleveland
1869 Waffle iron invented
1891 Thomas Edison patents motion picture camera
1909 Workers start pouring concrete for Panama Canal
1912 NYC ticker tape parade for Jim Thorpe & victorious US olympians
1912 Territory of Alaska organized
1912 US passes Anti-gag law, federal employees right to petition the govt
1932 1st transcontinental non-stop flight by a woman, Amelia Earhart
1936 Australian Antarctic Territory created
1939 Germany & USSR sign 10-year non-aggression pact
1949 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) established
1950 1st US Negro delegate to UN appointed-ES Sampson
1950 Operation Magic Carpet-45,000 Yemenite Jews move to Israel
1954 Communist Control Act passed, at height of McCarthyism
1954 International Amateur Athletic Federation recognizes Red China
1956 1st non-stop transcontinental helicopter flight arrived Wash DC
1959 Hiram L Fong sworn in as 1st Chinese-American senator while Daniel K Inouye sworn in as 1st Japanese-American Rep (Both from Hawaii)
1960 -127 F (-88ø C), Vostok, Antarctica (world record)
1960 60 people die when bus plunges off bridge into Turvo River, Brazil
1961 Former nazi leader Johannes Vorster becomes South Africa's minister of justice (if the shoe fits...)
1963 1st 200 meter freestyle swum under 2 minutes (Don Schollander 1:58)
1963 John Pennel is 1st to pole-vault 17'
1966 USSR launches Luna 11 for orbit around Moon
1967 Liberian flag designed
1968 France became world's 5th thermonuclear power 1970 Bomb kills 1 at U of Wisconsin's Army Math Research Center in Madison
1976 Soyuz 21 returns to Earth
1979 NFL fans (60,916) choose old Patriots logo over new
1979 UN's Vienna office begins issuing postage stamps
1981 Mark David Chapman is sentenced to 20 yrs to life for Lennon's murder
1984 Pat Bradley set the LPGA record for 9 holes with a 28 at Denver
1985 STS 51-I mission scrubbed at T -5m because of bad weather
1987 Announcement of possible Martian tornadoes
1989 Pete Rose is suspended from baseball for life for gambling
1989 Voyager 2 flies past Neptune
1990 Iraqi troops surround US & other embassies in Kuwait City
1991 Gorbachev resigns as head of USSR Communist Party
1991 Ukraine declares independence from the USSR