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Holidays

Feast day of St. Donnan, St. Aybert, St. Stephen Harding, St. Innocent of Tortona, St. Mappalicus and Others, and St. Robert of Chaise-Dieu.

Syria: Independence Day / Evacuation Day (withdrawal of French troops 1946).

American Samoa: Flag Day.

Events

1194 – Richard the Lionhearted returned to England and was crowned for the second time after his epic journey and victory in the Third Crusade.

1492 – Christopher Columbus and a representative of Spain’s King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella signed a contract, giving Columbus a commission to seek a western route to the Indies.

1524 – Giovanni da Verrazano discovered New York Harbor.

1629 – Horses were first imported into the colonies by the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

1861 – Virginia voted to secede from the Union, the 8th state to do so.

1875 – The game “snooker” was invented by Sir Neville Chamberlain.

1916 – The American Academy of Arts and Letters obtained its charter from Congress.

1929 – Baseball player Babe Ruth and Claire Hodgeson, a former member of the Ziegfield Follies, married.

1941 – Yugoslavia surrendered to Germany in World War II.

1941 – Igor Sikorsky accomplished the first successful helicopter liftoff, in Stratford, Connecticut.

1961 – About 1500 CIA-trained Cuban exiles launched the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in a failed attempt to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro.

1964 – Ford Motor Company unveiled the Mustang.

1969 – A jury in Los Angeles convicted Sirhan Sirhan of assassinating Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

1969 – Czechoslovak Communist Party chairman Alexander Dubcek was deposed.

1970 – The astronauts of Apollo 13 splashed down safely in the Pacific, after four days in a crippled spacecraft.

1975 – Phnom Penh fell to the Communist Khmer Rouge, ending Cambodia’s five-year war.

2004 – Abdel Aziz al-Rantissi, co-founder of the militant Palestinian Islamist organization Hamas, was killed by an Israeli missile hitting his car.

Births

1837 – John Pierpont (J.P.) Morgan, American industrialist, financier.

1880 – Leonard Woolley (photo), English archaeologist

1885 – Isak Dinesen (Karen Dinesen), Danish writer.

1894 – Nikita Khrushchev, USSR premier (1958 – 1964).

1897 – Thornton Wilder, American Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist.

1923 – Harry Reasoner, American broadcast journalist.

1972 – Jennifer Garner, American actress.

Deaths

1936 – Charles Ruijs de Beerenbrouck, Prime Minister of the Netherlands from 1918 to 1925, and from 1929 to 1933.

1998 – Linda McCartney, American-born wife of Paul McCartney.

2003 – Robert C. Atkins, American cardiologist and nutritionist, diet doctor.

2003 – Paul Getty, American-born philanthropist.

Source: Reference.com