1218 The Fifth Crusade leaves Acre, a city above Jerusalem, for Egypt
1595 Nomenclator of Leiden University Library appears, the first printed catalog of an institutional library
1689 English Parliament guarantees freedom of religion for Protestants
1738 John Wesley is converted, launching the Methodist movement; celebrated annually by Methodists as Aldersgate Day
1755 Smuggler Louis Mandrin considered the French Robin Hood is sentenced to be broken on the wheel, a medieval form of torture and execution that breaks the bones of the subject
1764 Samuel Adams writes instructions for Boston Town Meeting opposing the Sugar Act, laying groundwork for colonial resistance to taxation without representation
1775 John Hanco*ck is unanimously elected President of the Second Continental Congress
1798 Irish Rebellion of 1798 led by the United Irishmen against British rule begins
1818 General Andrew Jackson captures Pensacola, Florida
1822 Battle of Pichincha, Simón Bolívar secures the independence of Ecuador from Spain
1830 "Mary Had A Little Lamb" by Sarah Josepha Hale is first published by Boston firm Marsh, Capen & Lyon
1830 1st regular passenger rail service on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad line, horse-drawn rail cars connect Baltimore to Ellicott's Mills
1844 Samuel Morse taps out "What hath God wrought" in the world's first telegraph message
1856 Pottawatomie Massacre: John Brown and abolitionist settlers kill five pro-slavery settlers in Franklin County, Kansas
1861 Union Major General Benjamin Butler declares escaped slaves "contraband of war", after three slaves escaped to Fort Monroe - will become Union policy and change the course of the war
1862 Beardslee field telegraph used for 1st time during US Civil War
1862 Westminster Bridge across The Thames in London opens, becoming the second such bridge after an earlier bridge fell into decay
1866 Berkeley, California named (for George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne, County Cork, Ireland)
1870 Memoria of Jackson Kemper, 1st Episcopal Church Missionary Bishop in US
1878 CA Parker (Harvard) wins 1st American bike race at Beacon Park in Boston
1883 Brooklyn Bridge opened by President Chester A. Arthur and NY Governor Grover Cleveland
1894 Lowell Observatory, Arizona, first begins observations of Mars with an eighteen-inch telescope, leads its builder Percival Lowell to conclude there are canals on Mars
1899 W.T. McCullough opens the 1st auto repair shop in Boston
1915 Thomas Edison invents telescribe to record telephone conversations
1916 US pilot William Thaw shoots down a German Fokker, believed to be the first US airman to engage in aerial combat in WW I
1921 Bulhoek Massacre: police commissioner Colonel Theodore Truter leads 6 squadrons and artillery detachment against Israelite religious sect collected at annual gathering on the land of Israelite leader Enoch Mgijima at Ntabalanga; 190 killed
1928 Italian aviator Umberto Nobile flies airship Italia over North Pole again (crashes onto ice pack a day later)
1931 1st US air-conditioned train, Columbian, begins operation by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad
1941 German battleship Bismarck sinks the British battle cruiser HMS Hood; 1,416 die, 3 survive
1944 Icelandic voters severe all ties with Denmark
1951 US Supreme Court upholds that racial segregation in Washington, D.C. restaurants is illegal
1954 Dr Peter Murray Marshall becomes 1st African American to head an American Medical Association unit (New York County)
1954 IBM announces vacuum tube "electronic" brain that could perform 10 million operations an hour
1957 6.5 earthquake strikes Colombia
1958 United Press Association and International News Service merge to form United Press International
1959 1st house with built-in bomb shelter exhibited (Pleasant Hills, Pennsylvania)
1962 US astronaut Scott Carpenter aboard Aurora 7 (Mercury-Atlas 7) orbits the Earth three times in a flight just under five hours
1965 Supreme Court declares federal law allowing post office to intercept communist propaganda is unconstitutional
1976 1st commercial SST flight to North America (Concorde to Washington, D.C.)
1976 In the Judgment of Paris, wine testers rate wines from California higher than their French counterparts, challenging the notion of France being the foremost producer of the world's best wines
1978 American management consultant Marilyn Loden first coins the term "glass ceiling" to describe invisible career barriers for women
1980 Iran rejects a call to World Court to release US hostages
1983 Supreme Court rules government can deny tax breaks to schools that racially discriminated against students
1987 Golden Gate Bridge 50th anniversary: Over 800K people show up, 300K walk on bridge at same time, span temporarily flattens from weight (San Francisco, California)
1989 Sonia Sutcliffe, wife of the Yorkshire Ripper, is awarded £600,000 in damages after winning a libel action against satirical magazine Private Eye (later reduced to £60,000 on appeal).
1997 STS 84 (Atlantis 19), lands
2001 Mountain climbing: 15-year-old Sherpa Temba Tsheri becomes the youngest person to climb to the top of Mount Everest.
2004 North Korea bans mobile phones.
2016 Kaduna state in Nigeria declares a state of emergency due to 'Tomato Ebola', as moth destroys 80% of tomato crops
2018 Record US fentanyl seizure of 120lbs (54kg) confirmed by police in Nebraska in April, enough to kill 26 million people, one of largest drug busts in US history
2018 US President Donald Trump signs into law the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act easing financial regulations and reducing oversight for banks
2020 Millions of cicadas in a once in 17-year event about to emerge from the earth in the US south posing crop danger and noise issues, according to scientists from Virginia Tech
2022 19 children and two teachers shot and killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, by an 18-year-old gunman
2023 Man with paralysis walks naturally for the first time in 12 years after a Swiss team created a neurological link between the brain and spinal cord, findings published in "Nature"
